David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock

Alice Neel did not flatter her subjects. She depicted her sitters—often family, neighbors, or friends that she admired—with candor, capturing them in intense, psychologically charged moments. Here we see David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock, two well-known New York art critics and a romantic couple at the time. Bourdon is shown in a suit and tie, while Battcock is half-dressed and disheveled. Curator Richard Flood has described the painting as “a devastatingly unnerving portrait of a relationship that has gone irrevocably wrong.” In many ways, this painting can also be understood as a portrait of Neel and her desire to honestly portray the marginalized bohemian world that she inhabited. Neel painted Bourdon and Battcock at a time when very few people were openly gay in the United States. The year Neel made this double portrait, 1970, the first gay pride parades took place in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, timed to coincide with the one-year-anniversary of the riots that erupted after the police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York. Critically recognized only late in her life, Neel is now considered to be one of the twentieth century’s most significant portraitists.