In every painting, there’s an anchor that pulls you in, though, whether in the pose, details of dress, or Neel’s endlessly fascinating treatment of hands. The exhibition features 70 such works of Neel’s friends, her sons, their ex-girlfriends, loners, drop-outs, draftees, revolutionaries, expectant mothers, poets, museum curators, and strangers off the street. During the 1960s, she delved deeper in her feminist ideas, in favour of the civil rights movement, the rights of homosexuals, and more.

Her canvases celebrate those who were often marginalised in society such as labour leaders, black and Puerto Rican children, pregnant women, Greenwich Village eccentrics, civil rights activists and queer performers. Neel painted right up to her death and was known to phone friends to exclaim: “Guess what, I’m alive! During the visit, Neel asked the agents whether they would sit for a painting, to which they politely declined. Neel communicates well the hardship and trauma weighing on her subjects through distracted eyes or even a slump of the shoulders.It starts in Havana, where Neel moved with her first husband in 1926 – at a time when women still weren’t really meant to paint – with a couple of hazy, sludgy portraits. The Barbican’s exhibition treats Neel’s politics as something of a curio, a by-product of the humanistic value she places on life rather than the other way around. This exhibition highlights Neel’s understanding of the politics of seeing and what it means to feel seen; organised in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou Paris, it opens at Barbican Art Gallery on 16 February 2023.

In 1960, with a studio crammed full of pictures she couldn’t get exhibited, let alone sell, she rang O’Hara and requested a sitting. Born in Colwyn, Pennsylvania, Alice Neel enrolled at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1921 where she decided she had just what it took to be a good artist: ‘hypersensitivity and the will of the devil. She focused her energy on making portraits of neighbours and friends which are remarkable for their depth of empathy, as she set out to ‘reveal the inequalities and pressures as shown in the psychology of the people I painted’.

Peslikis’s right leg hangs over the armrest while her curling right arm shows off an unshaven armpit. The heads are always slightly too large for the bodies, the brushwork is never flattering but emphatic; here and there you are looking at garrulous caricature.

There’s nothing remote about these paintings, decades after they were made: her struggles and her subjects remain current. In 1959, Neel featured in the short film Pull My Daisy, which marked a critical juncture in her career, as she began to mix with a wider circle of creatives and became an increasingly beloved figure among New York’s community of artists. The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.

Part of what’s being represented is the trust itself, the willingness to expose vulnerability, on which the painting’s existence depends. The Barbican exhibition Hot Off The Griddle shows the awe-striking will and skill of an artist set on making a difference in a way that wasn’t fashionable at the time. To her left, affixed on a blue wall under the vaulting industrial pipes of the Centre Pompidou is the double portrait Wellesley Girls (Kiki Djos ‘68 and Nancy Selvage ’67) (1967).

In American Visions, the critic Robert Hughes says of Henri that he “wanted art to be akin to journalism. You see the good and bad, the highs and lows, the streets and the lecture theatres of New York all thrown together without barriers or boundaries.As this new exhibition opens this week at the Barbican Centre in London (on display until May 21, 2023), her figurative portraits of the dispossessed in Spanish Harlem and of some of her fellow activist friends appear more relevant than ever. As 1960’s liberalism took hold, the world caught up with her – finally, an environment existed where her paintings could be celebrated.