Portrait

In 1911, Duncan Grant’s “Bathing” went on display as part of a design scheme for the dining room of the Borough Polytechnic in Southwark. This large painting depicts a group of strongly muscled male bathers diving, swimming and hauling themselves into a boat. Only one of them is wearing a bathing slip, and while this kind of spectacle might have been familiar to anyone educated at a public school at this period, the art critic of the Times complained that it could well have “a degenerative influence on the children of the working class.” The picture now hangs in Tate Britain, and is used on the gallery’s website to direct people to an account of “Queer Life and Art.

There is no portrait by Alice Neel quite as radical as her own. The artist was one of the first octogenarian women to exhibit a nude of herself with 1980’s “Self-Portrait.” In the painting, Neel grasps her paintbrush and sits exposed at the edge of a blue-and-white striped armchair. There’s no doubt about it; this is a woman of conviction who demands, “Look at me, in all my senescent glory: my silver hair, wrinkled face, sagging breasts, this is a life lived and here are its marks.” It’s only in the last decade or so that Neel has risen from relative obscurity to be acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s greatest portraitists.