‘She really wanted to see my labia piercing’: what was it like to be painted by Alice Neel?

A dominatrix in heels and feathers, a Warhol alumnus who whip-danced for the Velvet Underground, a feminist trailblazer … ahead of major Barbican show, three giant personalities relive sitting for the great American artist

An unusual guest captivated viewers of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show on 21 February 1984. Alice Neel was not the conventional celebrity but a painter and activist who’d been documenting poverty, resistance and radical lives in New York since the 1920s. She was also very funny. The 84-year-old communist started by teasing Carson about his latest divorce before suggesting he should make a show about the backstage life of a chat show host – instantly inventing postmodern comedy with a pop imagination to rival her friend Andy Warhol.

Neel was a hit – but she would be dead from colon cancer later that year. However, this final blaze of media glory was a fittingly American triumph, for Neel is as much an artist of American individualism as F Scott Fitzgerald. Her portraits capture larger-than-life people, big personalities who fill the canvas with colourful clothes or naked flesh. She paints her subjects entire, seeing selves in bodies, not just faces. For her, those bodies are never meat, but vulnerable revelations. She got Warhol to let her paint his scarred, frail torso after he was shot, and portrayed herself nude with the same honesty. Dressed or not, posing for Neel was an intimate experience. She had a way of seeing secrets. Here, three of Neel’s Americans remember seeing themselves anew through her eyes.

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