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Ginny in a Striped Shirt
Alice Neel (1900–1984)
Oil on canvas, 1969

Enlarged image

Estate of Alice Neel
© Estate of Alice Neel


Ginny in a Striped Shirt
Alice Neel (1900–1984)
Oil on canvas, 1969

Alice Neel was an avowed feminist throughout her life, and her belief in the power of her sex as well as her independent spirit sometimes caused her great pain and hardship. By the late 1960s, her fierce belief in women was even more evident in her art. Neel painted this portrait when she visited her son Hartley and his girlfriend Virginia “Ginny” Taylor (born 1944) in San Francisco. Over the course of three sittings, the subject’s personality emerged and the painting captured what Ginny sees with hindsight as her own heroic spirit:

[It] caught something the others did not—a certain passionate anxiety for life. It . . . sees in me all the aspiration, conflict, determination, doubt, certainty, expectation, passion and disillusionment that was swirling around and within me: a young idealistic and earnest member of the sixties generation who had seen just enough to doubt but still wanted to believe in a utopian future.



Enlarged image

Estate of Alice Neel
© Estate of Alice Neel