Canvases of Compassion

Looking at the Alice Neel show at the UC Santa Barbara Art Museum, the viewer can’t help but get the impression that the artist was a people person, in the deepest sense.

Born in 1900, Neel grew up with the century and had to realize that her interest in people wasn’t always in sync with art-worldly fashion, as abstraction and conceptualism shifted attention away from the figure.

In fact, it wasn’t until the artist--and the century--were in their ‘60s that Neel’s work began to enjoy the respect of the art world. Today, the disarmingly honest portraits making up the show, “Kinships, Alice Neel Looks at the Family,” have a sharp, contemporary appeal, particularly now that figurative painting has again become a respected practice.

Two sides of Neel’s personality seem to emanate from photographs at the entrance of the exhibit. Lida Moser’s shot, circa 1964, shows the artist in a bathrobe and beaming on the front step of her apartment building in New York City.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s image of her from 1984, the year of her death, is a more somber affair, a portrait of the artist in a simple black dress. She appears proud, with an unstinting gaze tinged with imperious wisdom; the survivor in full flower, perhaps facing her own mortality with a defiant strength.

The image is a stark counterpoint to Neel’s painting, “Last Sickness,” which depicts her own mother in 1953, the year she died, as a crumpled, resigned mass in a checkered robe. We learn that her mother wasn’t particularly supportive of her daughter’s artistic work.

In her own life, Neel worked through her share of adversities, in part because she made her way as an artist before it was common for women to do so. Early on, she was estranged from her daughter and artist husband.

She suffered a nervous breakdown in 1930, and had a lover destroy many of her artworks from the ‘30s. She rebounded and had two sons, who later had children of their own: There was more family for her to contend with, as a matriarch and a painter.

Through it all, Neel produced compassionate realist paintings of those around her, including family and folks around the neighborhoods--in Spanish Harlem and then in the New York art world.

A different kind of nude female archetype is the core of her large canvas, “The Pregnant Woman,” which depicts her daughter-in-law Nancy (a frequent model), reclining sans clothing.

It’s surprising that the pregnant nude is so rare a subject in art, considering the aspects of miracle and metamorphosis inherent in the condition. Here, the figure, very full and very pregnant, is painted with intensity, while the rest of the canvas is left spare and incomplete, including the husband’s face in the background. Neel gives her subject its due credit.

Though it is evident, nudity isn’t really the point in Neel’s gallery of portraits, from the image of baby Andrew--his penis the axis around which the composition spins--to the portrait of “Cindy Nemsers and Chuck,” a nude couple lounging on their sofa.

Raw emotion is conveyed in “The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson, and Julia).” Here, a culturally hip Manhattan family--he, a composer-critic, she, an artist and former model, and young daughter--sit on a couch and project a warm, yet hands-off family bond.

Neel often revealed her subjects and her own artistic instincts by deploying clever touches in the periphery of her paintings. “Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian” sit in a cramped, nuzzling position at a table, on which a bowl of fruit serves as a still-life study neatly tucked within the portrait.

The wittily organized “Nancy and the Rubber Plant,” from 1975, finds Nancy sitting in the lower half of the vertically formatted painting, with a rubber plant looming overhead and another painting of an older woman on the wall, almost literally peeking through the shiny leaves. It’s as if the woman in the painting is imparting wisdom and warning to the younger woman below.

The gallery is full of frank, yet stylized portraits, in which Neel captures the reality and individuality of the subjects, who are always posed naturally and without false cheer or pretense. And yet Neel the artist also surfaces, through the quirks and exaggerations and “unfinished” qualities of her work, as a people person with an uncommon eye and mind.

* “Kinships: Alice Neel Looks at the Family,” through April 27 at the UCSB Art Museum. Gallery hours: Tue.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; Sun., 1-5 p.m.; 893-2951.

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20/20 Hindsight: Time flies when you’re showing art, at least that’s the tacit message of “20/20,” the show at the Contemporary Arts Forum. It’s hard to believe the arts forum began operations two decades back. Under the direction of Betty Klausner, it fairly quickly has cemented its place among the elite contemporary art spaces on the West Coast, and, under Nancy Doll’s direction, has continued to thrive, and to fend off the boll weevil of fiscal oppression.

The current retrospective show serves as a hearty reminder of the art that has filtered through the forum over the years. Alumni from the first “Home Show,” an arts forum highlight, include the woodsy Ursula von Rydingsvard, Erika Rothenberg--showing socially charged, acerbic greeting cards--and installation art heroine Ann Hamilton, formerly of Santa Barbara.

This is an all-star show, including Chris Burden, Joan Snyder and dark humorist Lynn Foulkes, whose painting-cum-relief-piece “But I Thought Art Was Special (Mickey and Me)” finds him up to his grisly cartoonish antics. Mary Ellen Marks’ photographs celebrate circus folks, while sculptor Donald Lipski basks in irrational rusticity, and Kathryn Phillips exhibits painterly cunning.

We also find pieces from Northern Californian notables such as William T. Wiley and his dreamily anecdotal painting, “Just to Mention a Few--After Bosch,” Wayne Thiebaud and cowboy-concept-man Terry Allen. All in all, a juicy tribute to a valued art forum.

* “20/20,” through April 13 at Contemporary Arts Forum, 653 Paseo Nuevo, Santa Barbara. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Wed.-Sat., 12-5 p.m., Sun.; 966-5373.