2021-12-16
42 分钟Is art really meant to be an “asset class”? Will the digital revolution finally democratize a market that just keeps getting more elitist? And what will happen to the last painting Alice Neel ever made? (Part 3 of “The Hidden Side of the Art Market.”)
I'm Doctor James Deneen, and I'm a primary care internist at the Mass General Hospital in Boston, where I practiced for 45 years and retired from patient care in 2008.
James Deneen is looking through some photographs from a long time ago.
This is my city in Alice Neal's backyard.
This is Alice beginning the portrait.
Alice Neil was a painter born in 1900.
Her specialty was painting people, what you and I might call portraits.
But she didn't care for that word.
Neil was resistant to the genre of portraiture, which she associated with status and wealth.
And that's Kelly Baum.
She's a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Stuffy, stiff, uninspired, overly romanticized, without a critical or radical.
Neil preferred to call her paintings pictures of people that are also history.
Neil's pictures are always more than just the person they represent.
Baum recently co curated a massive Alice Neill retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum.
It was called people come first.
The vast majority of the people Neil painted were not well known.
Doctor James Deneen fits that description.
Well, one day in the office, she said, I'd like to paint you.
So this is in early 1984, and my son and I drove down to Spring Lake, New Jersey, and she painted me in her backyard.
How did Alice Neal happen to meet James Deneen, and why did she decide to paint him?