After a life in obscurity, an artist’s big payday

By Sarah McColl

April 13, 2022

This week, we have an essay from writer (and fellow newsletter professional!) Sarah McColl, examining the life of Alice Neel, an artist who spent decades working in relative obscurity before her work was appreciated. But first, if you aren't subscribed to The Distance, please sign up here. Take it away, Sarah:

In May 2021, a painting by artist Alice Neel sat on Christie’s auction block. A minor work, Dr. Finger’s Waiting Room was expected to sell somewhere between $600,000 and $800,000. While Neel, born in 1900, is known as a painter of people, Dr. Finger’s Waiting Room depicts “a higgledy-piggledy arrangement of items,” as Christie’s described it, including a chair, a table, and three arrangements of flowers, pansies and lilacs. When the gavel fell — to an anonymous bidder by phone — at $3,030,000, it heralded a radical new market for the work of an artist who painted in obscurity throughout most of a lifetime of poverty, mental health struggles, and unimaginable personal loss.

“It would be almost impossible for her to imagine, even in 1982 or ’83, that paintings of hers would sell for those kinds of prices,” Kelly Baum, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, told Freakonomics Radio late last year.

Impossible to imagine because for most of her life, not many people cared for Alice Neel’s work, let alone paid for it. Fiercely independent, she was not one to follow social or artistic convention or trends. When abstraction was all the rage, Neel painted people, and when most “nice white lady artists" — as The New Yorker’s Hilton Als described — lived in Greenwich Village, Neel, a single mother on welfare, lived much of her life in a railroad apartment in New York’s Spanish Harlem.

But even poverty was a pale shadow in comparison to her personal loss. Her first child died of diphtheria in infancy. Her second child, Isabetta, was taken by Neel’s then-husband to be raised in his native Cuba by his sisters; Isabetta was estranged from Alice for most of their lives. Over the next year, Alice had a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide twice, and was hospitalized. But she never stopped painting.

“You know what it takes to be an artist?” Neel asked in Phoebe Hoban’s 2010 biography, Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty. “Hypersensitivity and the will of the devil. To never give up.”

But how does this work exactly? How does a person survive psychological trauma and financial hardship and continue to devote themselves to work that garners little regard or remuneration? How did Alice Neel keep going?

I ask somewhat selfishly. I am in year three (or five, depending how you count; pinpointing the beginning of a book is like trying to find the start of a circle) of writing my second book, a novel, and I often want to give up. I won’t be paid — if I am ever paid — until every sentence has been polished like a stone. It’s slow-going; I have a two-year-old. Still more years from now, a publisher may decide to buy it, ideally in a Dr. Finger’s Waiting Room-style bidding war.

Meanwhile, I need to pay for daycare and coffee today. The economics make no sense, so why do I keep trying?

Artists are called many things: crazy, depressed, bad with money. What's frequently overlooked is their capacity to endure, to keep making their work when no one cares. (And usually nobody cares. I mean, nobody.)

In a study published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, researchers from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence found there’s something to the stereotypes. Artists ranked moderately higher on stress and anxiety compared to non-artists (“crazy,” you might say), but also, surprisingly, ranked higher on measures of ego resilience, psychological well-being, and hope.

This is counter to the norm, researchers pointed out. Usually, people who experience symptoms of stress, anxiety, or depression are less likely to have hope or resilience. Only about 10% of people have higher degrees of both psychological vulnerabilities and resources.

That unique combination, on a moderate level, can predict creative achievement, researchers found.

To make sense of this might also be like trying to find the beginning of a circle. Maybe artists are hopeful because they can make art. No matter what hardship they encounter, they can transform that experience, use it for artistic end. (“Everything is copy,” as Nora Ephron’s mother told her.) The ability to depict and externalize suffering can lend a feeling of control, however illusory. Alice Neel knew this.

“I hate to be powerless,” Neel said in Patricia Hill’s 1983 book, Alice Neel, “so I live by myself and do all these pictures, and I get an illusion of power, which I know is only an illusion, but still I can have it.”

I know the illusion, too, which powered my first book: I wrote about my mother’s death because I couldn't write about anything else. I was only thirty-two, and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye, so for three years, I didn’t. In my mind and on the page, my mom continued to tuck in the tags of my sweaters and offer unsolicited advice in her girly sing-song. She kept me company while I grieved the actuality of her death. I don’t think art is therapy, but the effect of the work can be therapeutic.

In Alice Neel’s monochromatic picture Futility of Effort, painted in 1930, a child hangs from a bed in a white nightgown. “It related to the experience of having a child die of diphtheria,” Neel said.

I’m moved by the painting’s title. Only in the depiction of futility — the acknowledgement of life’s events of senseless horror and despair — could Alice Neel continue her efforts, both maternal and artistic, for another fifty years. She had two sons, and finally, in the last years of her life, Alice Neel’s overlooked career found a movement of champions in Second Wave feminism. When she was 74, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a retrospective of her work.

I have been thinking about artistic endurance backward. The question is not how do artists keep going with their art. We keep going because of it. However glacial the progress of my novel, writing is my tether to a rich emotional landscape of meaning. Without it, I’d be worse off. More frustrated, more depressed, more anxious — “crazier,” so to speak.

“If I don’t paint for certain lengths of time, I get into frightfully morbid moods,” Neel said. “But the minute I begin to work, I’m cured.”

Art’s magic is that the cure is not a closed circuit. Neel’s work enlivens anyone who stands before her canvases. “She portrayed things somehow only she could see: the psychology and spirit, the vital essence, of her sitters,” wrote Bridget Quinn in Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in That Order).

What she sees, we see, too. Our eyes open. We keep going.

Sarah McColl is the author of the memoir Joy Enough and the newsletter Lost Art. She teaches creative writing and lives with her family in Northern California.

Other artists and thinkers who had delayed success

Following the theme of Sarah’s article, many of us know about Van Gogh and Kafka as marquee names when it comes to artists who worked in obscurity, only to find posthumous success. Below are a few other creators of great works and ideas, whose accolades only came later in life… if at all.

1. Vera Wang — Vera Wang’s recognition didn’t come in old age, exactly, but her career as a fashion designer didn’t get traction until her 40s, after a failed run as an Olympics figure skater, and a stint in the publishing world. Now, she’s known to dress celebrities and world leaders.

2. Roberto Bolaño — Now considered one of the truly superb fiction writers of the past few decades, Bolaño saw himself primarily a poet for most of his life. However, as legend goes, when his health began to deteriorate in the early 2000s, he started writing stories and novels, which he viewed as more potentially lucrative, in order to support his family; those books went on to win awards worldwide, and in 2012, nine years after his death, the New York Times described Bolaño as “the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation.”

3. Ignaz Semmelweis — A 19th century physician and scientist, Semmelweis postulated and practiced early theories in sanitation, such as the importance of washing one’s hands before surgery. His critical ideas weren’t widely accepted until years after his death, when germ theory was embraced by the broader scientific community.

4. James Hampton — The strangest and most obscure name on this list, Hampton spent 14 years building an extensive and awesome (in the biblical sense) art installation in his garage out of scavenged materials, while working as a janitor. The art wasn’t discovered until after his death, and it has since become part of the collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

5. Vivian Maier — Maier was a nanny who spent decades working in the street photography tradition in total obscurity, secreting away tens of thousands of negatives in Chicago storage lockers. Her pictures were eventually discovered by collectors in 2007 but didn’t earn wider attention until shortly after Maier’s death in 2009, when they went viral on Flickr, receiving global recognition in the time since.

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