SFMOMA, Part 17: Floor 2, section 1900 to Now.
On Floor 2, in the 1900 to Now galleries, two men are sitting at a kitchen table, and the younger one is looking at you like he has already decided what he thinks of you.
The painting is Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian, and the first thing it does is refuse to be impressive. There is no drama in the composition. Two men sit side by side at a plain wooden table. Behind them, a wall — barely painted, the color of primer. On the table, a bowl of fruit, the only prop. The older man, Geoffrey, has his arm around the younger man's shoulder, or the younger man has his arm around Geoffrey — the exact geometry of the embrace is less important than its ease. Geoffrey smiles slightly, the way people smile when they are comfortable. Brian does not smile. He looks straight out of the canvas, curly black hair, dark eyes, his plaid shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and his gaze has the particular directness of someone who has agreed to be painted and intends to get something out of the transaction.
It is, on paper, a modest painting. Two guys at a table. But stand in front of it for a minute and it starts to do the thing all Alice Neel portraits do: it makes you feel like you have walked into the middle of a relationship, and the relationship is more interesting than you are.
Alice Neel painted Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian in 1978, in oil on canvas. SFMOMA acquired it by exchange, through an anonymous gift. It is currently on view on Floor 2 as part of 1900 to Now: SFMOMA's Collection. The sitters are Geoffrey Hendricks, the Fluxus artist, and his partner Brian Buczak, painted in Neel's apartment.
The easy reading is that this is a sweet portrait of a gay couple in the 1970s — a document of queer affection, painted with warmth. But the subject is sharper than that. Neel did not paint symbols or causes. She painted people who sat still long enough, and her genius was for the specific gravity of an actual relationship: the way Brian's hand rests, the way Geoffrey leans, the fraction of an inch between comfort and performance. This is not a painting about gay liberation. It is a painting about two particular men who loved each other, made by a woman who loved looking at people more than she loved any idea about them. The politics are in the attention, not the subject.
1978: The kitchen table as studio
Alice Neel never had a proper studio. She could not afford one. So she painted in her apartment — for decades, in a series of New York apartments — and she invited her models home. This is not a minor biographical detail. It is the entire method.
The portraits were made the way dinner parties are made: people came over, they sat down, they talked. Neel was famous as a talker — "It was so seductive," the artist Benny Andrews said of sitting for her. "She bewitched you. And you can see it in my portrait." She told stories, she asked questions, she kept people in the chair long enough for the performance to wear off. The kitchen table in Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian is not a set. It is her kitchen table. The bowl of fruit is not a symbol. It is the bowl of fruit that was on the table.
This is what separates Neel from every other portraitist of the century. The tradition she inherited — Sargent, Boldini, the whole machinery of the society portrait — was about flattery and power: the painter making the sitter look important. Neel inverted it. Her sitters were friends, neighbors, lovers, strangers from the street, and she painted them the way they looked when they stopped trying to look like anything. The brushwork is loose and visible — she left the labor in, the pentimenti, the places where she changed her mind. The backgrounds are thin, barely there, because the person was the whole room.
Geoffrey Hendricks was a Fluxus artist — part of the loose, anarchic movement that treated art as event and object as joke — and Brian Buczak was his partner. Neel painted them in 1978, which was late in her career and late in the decade: Stonewall was nine years past, the gay liberation movement was in full swing, and the art world was finally, reluctantly, paying attention to queer life. Neel had been painting queer subjects for years — Jackie Curtis, the Warhol superstar; the poet Adrienne Rich; plenty of others — not as statements but as people she knew. The painting's tenderness is not advocacy. It is accuracy. She liked these men, and it shows.
1900–1938: Four weeks younger than the century
Alice Neel was born January 28, 1900, in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, and she liked to say she was "four weeks younger than the century." It was a good line, and it was also a thesis: she was going to paint the century, person by person, and she was going to do it from the inside.
She studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, graduating in 1925 — a serious art education, which makes her later style more interesting, because she chose the looseness. The early work was competent and forgettable. The Neel style — the wobbling line, the acidic color, the faces that look like they are thinking — did not arrive until she stopped trying to paint correctly and started trying to paint truthfully.
The 1930s were hard in the specific way the Depression was hard for everyone: she worked for the WPA, she lost a child to diphtheria, her marriage fell apart. She moved to Spanish Harlem in 1938, and that move — from the white suburbs to the Puerto Rican and Black neighborhood uptown — is the hinge of the career. She would live there for more than twenty years.
1938–1960s: El Barrio
Neel spent the 1940s and 1950s in Spanish Harlem, painting her neighbors: the mothers, the children, the men on the street, the whole dense human fabric of El Barrio. These are some of the greatest American portraits of the century, and almost nobody saw them at the time. The art world had decided that portraiture was dead — abstraction was the future, the figure was retrograde — and Neel, painting faces in Harlem, was unfashionable in the most complete way possible: not rebellious, just irrelevant.
She kept going. This is the part of the Neel story that matters most, and the part the late fame tends to smooth over. She did not paint portraits as a contrarian gesture. She painted them because she believed, completely, that a person's face was the most important thing in the world, and that the century's job was to look at faces. "Every person is a new universe," she said. It sounds like a platitude until you see a hundred of the universes in a row, and then it sounds like a research program.
1970s: The naked truth
By the 1970s, Neel was in her seventies, and the art world was finally catching up. The women's movement found her — here was a woman who had painted pregnant nudes, mothers, battered wives, queer couples, all with an honesty that made the male gaze look like a technical limitation. The portraits of the 1970s are the most famous now: the nudes that are not nudes but "nakeds," as the critics learned to say — bodies with swollen bellies and drooping breasts and sex organs presented without apology, painted with a frankness that still startles.
The famous detail: Neel would ask her sitters, at the outset, if they would take off their clothes. Most said no. Some said yes — perhaps, as one curator deadpanned, "without fully appreciating that they would become the subjects of some of the nudest nudes in the Western canon." Geoffrey and Brian kept their clothes on. The painting does not need them off. The intimacy is in the arm around the shoulder, the shared table, the way two people who know each other sit closer than strangers do.
What Neel understood — and what makes the 1970s portraits radical rather than merely permissive — is that the body is not the vulnerable part. The face is. Anyone can be naked. It is much harder to be seen. Her sitters are seen: the guarded postures, the crossed arms, the eyes that meet yours or evade you. She painted the self-consciousness along with the self.
1984 and after: People come first
Neel died October 13, 1984, in New York. She was 84. The obituaries were respectful and small. Then the retrospectives started — and kept starting, each one bigger than the last, until the Metropolitan Museum's Alice Neel: People Come First in 2021, which was her first museum retrospective in New York in twenty years and drew the kind of crowds usually reserved for the Impressionists.
The title of that show is the thesis of the career. People come first — before the movement, before the market, before the theory. Neel painted through the rise and fall of abstract expressionism, pop, minimalism, and conceptual art without changing course, because her course was not a style. It was a conviction: that looking carefully at another person is the most radical thing an artist can do.
The painting, again
Back on Floor 2, back to the kitchen table. The painting is smaller than you expect — Neel's portraits are human-scale, the size of the person, because they were painted in a room with the person in it. Brian's gaze is the thing you take with you. It is not hostile, exactly. It is assessing. He is letting himself be painted, and he wants to know what you are going to do with it.
Here is what I think the painting is actually about, and it is not the couple. It is the contract. Every Neel portrait is a record of a negotiation: the sitter agrees to be seen, the painter agrees to see honestly, and the painting is what survives of the deal. Geoffrey smiles because he trusts her. Brian stares because he is still deciding. The bowl of fruit sits between them, doing nothing, which is the most honest thing a prop can do.
Go stand in front of it and let Brian look at you for a while. It is uncomfortable, and it is supposed to be. That is what it feels like to be seen by someone who is good at it. 🌁
Timeline — Alice Neel
1900 — born January 28, Gladwyne, Pennsylvania ("four weeks younger than the century")
1925 — graduates Philadelphia School of Design for Women
1930s — WPA work; personal losses; marriage ends
1938 — moves to Spanish Harlem (El Barrio); lives there 20+ years, painting neighbors
1940s–50s — paints the great Harlem portraits; the art world ignores her (portraiture is "dead")
1970s — women's movement discovers her; paints queer subjects, pregnant "nakeds," the late masterpieces
1978 — paints Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian in her apartment
1984 — dies October 13, New York, at 84
2021 — Alice Neel: People Come First retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum
Today — Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian on view, Floor 2, 1900 to Now: SFMOMA's Collection, 151 Third Street