“Might one call Neel a kind of essayist of the canvas? When I first saw her work… I was immediately consumed by the stories she worked so hard to tell: about loneliness, togetherness, and the drama of self-presentation, spurred by the drama of being.”
Set against a bare wall, the floor ablaze in swaths of orange and ochre, poet and photographer Gerard Malanga eyes his viewer in his eponymous portrait by Alice Neel of 1969, the first in a group of canvases depicting members of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Gerard Malanga inducts its subject into Neel’s pantheon of sturdy, secular saints, as she canonizes figures of New York’s cultural underground with an intimate, affecting reverence. Held in the same private collection for over two decades, Gerard Malanga has been extensively and internationally exhibited, notably included in her monumental traveling retrospective in 2022-23 at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Barbican Art Gallery, London; and Munch Museum, Oslo. Born of Social Realism, Neel’s timeless mastery lies in her ability to lay bare the vulnerabilities of her sitters, and her painterly enterprise renders representation—both in her commitment to figuration and progressive racial and sexual activism—as relevant as ever.
Limbs slung over the rails of his chair, Malanga peers through ice-like irises, casting a Medusan gaze. Even in repose, he exudes self-assuredness, imbued with a statuesque gravity. Neel brings a freshness and levity to the historic weight of the seated portrait, not only through her selection of sitters but in her formal strategies. She articulates the contours of Malanga’s figure in pine, olive, aquamarine, and rose; shades of brick, amber, and salmon articulate his flesh, as though her characteristic, unrelenting candor affords her the power to see through skin and into anatomy—that of Malanga’s body and mind, soul and spirit. Here, academic standards of correctness are refuted, as shadows cast by a lackadaisical hand appear on the wall with graphic clarity, and verdant passages on his face and forearm whimsically nod to the green underpainting of Renaissance icons.
Neel came to the fore as painterly figuration began to leave the mainstream. Remaining staunchly illustrative amid predominant tides of Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptualism, Neel remained staid in her determination to craft figurative depictions that were both beautiful and bruising in their honesty. She completed the present work over the course of three sittings, which took place toward the end of Malanga’s collaboration with Warhol. Neel first met Malanga in 1962, through filmmakers Willard Masas and Marie Menken. “When I was introduced to her—I was about nineteen at the time,” Malanga recalled, “Willard said, ‘I want you to meet a very important artist,’ and there was Alice sitting on a sofa at this literary party.” (Gerard Malanga quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (and traveling), Alice Neel, June 2000 - December 2001, p. 68) The following year, Neel would meet Warhol, who wanted to feature her in one of his films—though this cameo never materialized—and from there, her relationship with the rest of the Factory followed. This fortuitous encounter gave way to her other Factory portraits, among them Jackie Curtis and Rita Red, and David Bourdon and Gergory Battcock, as well as her celebrated portrait of Warhol himself, to which the present work is often compared. Where Malanga appears comfortable and colorful, crowned with curls and heedlessly splayed in a black tee shirt and motorcycle boots, Warhol, by contrast, is shown in milky shades of white: vulnerably shirtless, scarred, demure, and inwardly drawn. Malanga’s “eyes, mouth, arms, hands, legs and feet,” Ellen H. Johnson observed, “are all as open and relaxed as Andy’s are tensely closed.” (Ellen H. Johnson in: "Alice Neel's Fifty Years of Portrait Painting," Studio International, vol. 193, no. 987, March 1977, p. 175)
Malanga was just twenty years old when his partnership with Andy Warhol began, before Warhol had even formally started the factory, and the first painting they completed together was a silver Liz. For nearly a decade, Malanga played an instrumental role in Warhol’s output, from starring regularly in his movies, serving as a primary silkscreen assistant, to being a founding editor of Interview magazine alongside Warhol and John Wilcock. So central was Malanga’s role in Warhol’s life that it would be him that escorted Julie Warhola to meet her son in the hospital after he was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1969. Once his work with the Factory had ended in the winter of 1970, Malanga dedicated himself fully to his own poetry and photography, which today—not unlike Neel’s portraits—preserve for posterity a bygone artistic milieu, from Brice Marden to Duke Ellington to, of course, Alice Neel.
"When I was introduced to her—I was about nineteen at the time. Willard said, ‘I want you to meet a very important artist,’ and there was Alice sitting on a sofa at this literary party.”
Exemplary of a vision and vanguardism far beyond Neel’s time, Gerard Malanga characterizes the very best of her remarkable output: the coolness of her subjects, the warmth of her brush, and the inimitable singularity of her vision. Her unorthodox, uncompromisingly honest approach to her practice has left us with portraits that remain impossibly fresh, which today stand as portals into the souls that populated her world. Neel’s great triumph in painting her ability to assure us, even posthumously, that her world is ours to share.
