CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/4/2026

Revolutionary portraiture in 'Alice Neel: I Am the Century'

“Woman in Café” (1975) is reproduced from Alice Neel: I Am the Century, a staff favorite for Women’s History Month. Published by Mousse Publishing to accompany an exhibition of the same name at Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin—where Neel’s work will be in dialogue with many masterpieces of nineteenth and twentieth-century portraiture, all painted by men—this volume “highlights Neel’s revolutionary ability to subvert the patriarchal tradition that for centuries turned women into passive subjects of the male gaze,” according to curators Sarah Cosulich and Pietro Rigolo. “Upending the canons of art history, Neel since the 1930s courageously portrayed the female body freed from idealization or sexualization, demonstrating instead a new creative position that ran parallel to her rebellious emancipation as a woman and anticipated later feminist movements of the 1960s. At the same time, Neel applied the same, nongendered gaze to men, courageously stripping the male figure of his heroic status, portraying her subjects nude, at times in the classic pose of an odalisque conventionally reserved for women, and revealing the dualisms and stereotypes tied to the construction of identity and to the traditional conception of power and desire.”