Alice Neel stands apart in the art of mid-20th-century New York in her mastery of portraiture and realism, a supposedly outmoded genre and a style antithetical to the increasingly popular abstraction of the New York School. This portrait of Georgie Arce, a boy growing up in Neel’s Spanish Harlem neighborhood, is both characteristic of her incisive, painterly style and unique for its specific subject and milieu. Neel, a white woman in a neighborhood of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Dominicans, usually painted her sitters from life in her own apartment, inviting them in for painting sessions. Between 1950 and 1959, Neel painted Arce at least four times, as frequently as she painted her own children during the same period. In contrast to her many dual or group portraits of children, Neel always painted Georgie Arce as a stand-alone figure, perhaps in response to his personality or as a result of his social or family circumstances. This painting is part of what art historian Pamela Allara has called Neel’s “social realist project” to create a collective portrait of Spanish Harlem. Politically and personally attuned to the effects of poverty on communities of color, Neel turned an artistic ritual traditionally reserved for white middle- or upper-class patrons – sitting for a portrait – into a dynamic (if uneven) cultural exchange. Rendered with Neel’s characteristic blend of precision and loose, painterly lines, young Georgie Arce emerges a willing subject both woven into and plucked from his surroundings. Amy Rahn Alice Neel is best known for her straightforward, often confrontational, portraits. After working as a secretary (1918-21) while attending evening classes at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, she enrolled at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design). She and her husband, Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez (1900–1957), traveled to Cuba in 1926 but moved to New York City the following year. When she moved to Spanish Harlem in 1938, she began to paint incisive portraits of family and friends, her Puerto Rican neighbors, and people she met on the street. She continued working in a figurative style, ignoring the rising abstract movement of the postwar era. With her move to the Upper West Side in the 1960s, she made her way back into the current artistic circles and portrayed important artists, curators, and gallery owners, such as the poet and writer Frank O'Hara, Pop artist Andy Warhol, and land artist Robert Smithson. In 1974 she was honored with a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. (http://postwar.hausderkunst.de/en/artworks-artists/artworks/georgie-arce)