Encountering Alice Neel’s paintings of mothers while pregnant
Her complex portraits reveal an alchemy of desire, pain, power, and weakness.
I am seven months pregnant when I visit People Come First, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective of the work of 20th-century painter Alice Neel. At the entrance I encounter myself disrobed: Margaret Evans Pregnant hangs five feet tall by three feet wide beside the exhibition title, and it portrays, with vivid presence, an expectant White woman, nude. Her belly is a globe—she is carrying twins—and her seated body bears the discomforts and exaggerations of the third trimester. Fatigue is implied in the jaundiced tones of her skin. Her navel protrudes. Her nipples seem disproportionally large, and a blue vein splinters across her breast. Her calves are purple, evincing the burden these children impose on her frame. At the same time, white brushstrokes lend luster to her green irises and suggest that quiet gladness lights this woman from within.
In pregnancy, I am exhausted and elated. I am weak and also in awe of my body’s secret vigor, of cells blooming in the dark, shaping tissue and bone. In Margaret Evans Pregnant, I see another woman who holds multiple experiences of pregnancy at the same time.
In Western art, motherhood has often been portrayed in a single dimension, serenity pervading the familiar subjects of the annunciation, the Madonna and child, and even the pietà. Marian art has been heartening to me in the past, as I’ve revered the Virgin’s obedience, her quiet wonder, and her dignity in the vocation of motherhood. I have spent hours with Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Annunciation, Michelangelo’s Pietà, and countless gilded icons of Mary and the infant Christ. Yet, as the mother of a two-year-old, expectant with my second, I crave a more dynamic visual language for motherhood.
