The art critic lies back, voluntarily naked, in the thick pelt of his own body hair: an ape of an odalisque. For no matter how familiar the sitters may be – painters, poets, trade unionists and intellectuals, Greenwich Villagers, Warhol’s superstars – the portraits remain outlandish.

By the 1940s, Neel had two sons, the first with a Puerto Rican musician and the second with a communist intellectual.

The exhibition displays these paintings incuding the powerful ‘Nazis Murder Jews’ (painted from memory) alongside large photographs of the streets of New York which have a successful effect of positioning the viewer looking into that world. From 1933, she received a small sum to produce pieces as part of the Public Works of Art Project (replaced by the Works Project Administration created by President Franklin D. She painted the poverty and squalor of Harlem where she lived in the 1930s and 40s, and which she described as ‘a battlefield of humanism’, her painting TB Harlem testament to the brutal treatment of the raging tuberculosis epidemic there. Neel, talking in a late documentary at the show’s end, was easily as fascinating and eccentric as any of her sitters. It has been widely reported that Georgie’s incarceration was a result of the chaos, violence and underfunded system he grew up with.

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). The American artist puts her sitters at such ease that, one way or another, they reveal all in a superbly curated show of her life’s work. Neel (1900-84) deserves her cult status in American art: a lifelong feminist, humanitarian, activist and braveheart; a woman who painted stubbornly figurative images all the way through abstract expressionism, minimalism and pop, who received scarcely any coverage or wall space. At odds with the expected large-sized exhibition catalogue, this publication has been designed to be more considered. This Parisian show will travel to London’s Barbican Art Gallery in February next year, in a slightly altered form and retitled Hot Off the Griddle.Neel–who died almost four decades ago at 84 years old—was relatively unknown for most of her life, but the vulnerability of her portrayals has made the artist into a household name across the globe today. Reader’s Digest is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (which regulates the UK’s magazine and newspaper industry).

The downstairs galleries at the Barbican are dedicated to highlights of Neel’s later portrait paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, when she made some of her most celebrated work. She paints it as it is, her sharp alert gaze contrasting with the uncompromising depiction of her sagging flesh and swollen ankles, her paintbrush evident in the foreground defining her.She was also ahead of the curve in her socialist art philosophy, painting people who were not usually portrayed because of their race, status, sexuality or views. The largest exhibition to date in the UK of American artist Alice Neel (1900–1984) whose vivid portraits capture the shifting social and political context of the American twentieth century. During the visit, Neel asked the agents whether they would sit for a painting, to which they politely declined. Before this point, she was vilified and erased for depicting those that society didn’t want to see: activists, ethnic minorities, queer people… it was her determination to represent them that, arguably, made her one of them.