Alice Neel, Black Draftee (James Hunter), 1965

By Tania Love Abramson

Alice Neel (1900-1984) was a prolific artist, primarily focused on portraiture. Though she painted continuously from the mid 1920’s until her death, she did not receive the wide acclaim she deserved for many years after she died. Neel was a radical, a Communist, a feminist, and an observer of the world around her. She centered what was most important to her – social justice, race, class, motherhood, and LGBTQ+ issues – in her life’s work. Family, friends, neighbors, gallerists, as well as other artists (even Andy Warhol) were her subjects. She was a self-described ‘collector of souls’ who lived her life exactly as she chose.

Neel’s current retrospective, Alice Neel: People Come First, at the De Young Museum in San Francisco through July 10, gives a broad overview of her exhaustive output, as well as an understanding of the person behind the paintings. What struck me the most was how Neel brought dignity to her subjects- finding and expressing their humanity above all else. A work I found particularly striking is the painting shown here, Black Draftee (James Hunter), 1965. She met Hunter on the street and invited him to sit for her. They agreed to two sittings. At the first, she learned he had been drafted for the Vietnam War and was due to leave within the week. He never returned to finish the portrait. Rather than abandon the painting, she later considered it complete as it is.

No one seems to know what happened to James Hunter. His name is not engraved on the Vietnam War Memorial in DC; his whereabouts unknown. The story of this portrait brings a deep profundity to the work itself. Rather than meet the viewers gaze, Hunter’s eyes are cast down in a pensive, inward directed expression. Perhaps he is confronting what is to come, making this an exceptionally poignant portrait of a young man about to meet an unknown fate in an unjust war. The ghost-like contours of his form seem to suggest that his presence on this earth is fleeting; he is disappearing even as his likeness endures. To me, the work reads like an enigma of tragic proportions. With so much blank canvas, it is apparent we know very little about James Hunter after all.

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Alice Neel, Black Draftee (James Hunter), 1965

Photo by Tania Love Abramson