Margaret Evans Pregnant is of a woman eight months pregnant with twins. The image shows a young pregnant woman seated on a small yellow chair. Evans sits upright, eyes focused straight ahead, hands clutching the chair. Completely nude, her skin encompasses a series of shades, which reveal bathing suit tan lines and spotted legs due to lack of circulation. Placed behind Evans is a mirror that allows the viewer to partially see the back of the chair, her upper back, neck and hair. Yet the reflected image does not appear exactly like Evans, the woman in the mirror looks older and wiser. The floor also acts as a mirror, echoing the chair as it is streaked with yellow shadows. Although the chair has a back, it is visibly uncomfortable for Margaret Evans. It forces her to sit straight and upright, a position that seems quite difficult with a pregnant stomach. The focus of the image is Evans’s bulging stomach as it is positioned in the very center or the canvas and is the brightest part of her body. Although Neel generally liked her sitters to find their own comfortable pose, this painting shows the opposite. Alice Neel, the documentary film, captures Neel painting this portrait. It shows Neel shifting Evans from the sofa to different chairs, from sitting to reclining, from legs crossed to legs open. Further deliberate decisions led to a mirror offstage right and the small, yellow uncomfortable boudoir chair. The manner in which Neel painted this portrait broke from her customary style of outlining the figure and beginning by painting the head. The documentary further reveals that for this work, she began by painting Evans’s distended belly, building it up in broad circular brushstrokes. By diminishing the importance and additionally, the presence, of the head, Neel’s painting suggests that the body is simply a container. Nancy, Neel’s daughter-in-law, who was often the subject of the painter’s portraits, recalled a conversation in which Neel shared her opinion on late pregnancy, “Your body ceases to be your own. You become a vessel. At a certain point you lose your self-image.” This quote, along with the film, helps us understand the portrait of Margaret Evans better from learning how Neel viewed pregnancy. What also fascinated Neel about pregnant nudes were the physical alterations. It is possible that this fact alone describes the deviant starting point of this portrait. As Carolyn Carr pointed out, “Neel relished every detail of the physical transformation of the topography of the female body.” Thus Neel viewed pregnancy as depleting and self-sacrificing in one respect, but also physically mesmerizing in another. Not one to hide the truth, Neel illustrates these experiences in both the method and final product of Margaret Evans Pregnant. The mirror behind Evans has created considerable speculations from observers and critics, yet Neel’s own motive for this section of the painting remains unknown. “It could represent,” Jeremy Lewison hypothesizes, “her identification - presumably unconscious - with the sitter. This might also explain why Evans looks considerably older in the mirror. The mirrored image is an uncanny double of the sitter and the artist, presaging older age.” Equally plausible is Lewison’s alternative reading, As though to complement this sense of distortion, and to make room for the bulk of the figure, Neel expands the space behind Evans, splitting the rear wall into two different planes. The mirror image is also a distortion. Some have suggested that it is an imaginative portrait of Evans at a later, postpartum stage. However, close scrutiny of Auder’s film reveals that the reflected image could be as much Neel’s profile as Evans’. That is to say, although Neel’s reflection is not available in the mirror to her as a painter, the features in the reflection appear to be a combination of her own and Evans’s. Given that many of Neel’s previous and later works were extremely autobiographical, it is plausible that she figuratively included a slight reflection of herself in the mirror. Overall, although the inclusion of the mirror was a deliberate choice of Neel’s, it will most likely remain ambiguous. In addition to the purposeful choice of pose and chair, Evans’ resulting unease is most likely intentional as well. Evans herself claims that Neel uncovered some unconscious feeling of “inner anxiety I was having that I wasn’t aware of”. A more experienced mother than Evans, it is possible that Neel projected on Evans her own recollected experience of pregnancy. This practice of injecting autobiographical details onto women sitters is similar to what occurred in Linda Nochlin and Daisy. Moreover, the unease visible in this painting echoes that of Daisy. Whereas Daisy’s youthful uneasiness made it difficult to stay still for long sittings, Evans was in her eighth month of pregnancy with twins. What’s more, it can be assumed that both sitting down and rising from this small uncomfortable chair was a difficult task. In both instances, Neel used this unease to further understand her sitters and uncover their inner emotions. By pulling out sentiments that were otherwise not apparent, Neel truly captured what is what like to be a woman, both as a child and when pregnant with a child. Bauer added a noteworthy comment to this topic as she noticed that Neel respects the integrity of each women’s experience of pregnancy, “she does not generalize, exploit or romanticize the condition.” In light of the larger context of a ‘humanist Neel’ who sought to capture the zeitgeist of the day, it underlines the fact that each and every human has a different experience despite living in the same era and even the same city. When Neel learned that Evans was pregnant, she immediately sought her out and persuaded her to pose. Margaret was a wife of Neel’s friend, landscape painter John Evans. Rather than depicting a feminist writer or prominent figure, what distinguishes this portrait is how it was painted and what it represents. Pregnancy, for Neel, was a basic fact of life. In the mid 60s, a number of females in her life become pregnant and she began this series of variations on the theme of nude. She painted her earliest, Couple on a Train in 1930, and subsequently Pregnant Maria (1964), Pregnant Julie and Algis (1967), Betty Homitzky (1968) and Pregnant Woman (1971). Yet of all these works, Margaret Evans Pregnant is the only full frontal pregnant nude ever painted by Neel. When asked why she painted pregnant nudes, Neel replied, “It isn’t what appeals to me, it’s just a fact of life. It’s a very important part of life and it was neglected. I feel as a subject it’s perfectly legitimate, and people out of false modesty, or being sissies, never showed it, but it’s a basic fact of life. Also plastically, it is very exciting… I think it’s part of the human experience. Something the primitives did, but modern painters have shied away from because women were always done as sex objects. A pregnant woman has a claim staked out; she is not for sale.” The fact that Neel chose ‘basic facts of life’ as worthy of portraits is what makes this series remarkable. In addition to distinguishing her from other painters and artists, this truly made Neel a humanist as she audaciously inserted a part of life that had been previously ignored into art history’s lexicon. Neel’s pursuit to paint the most real and honest human experiences is best shown by her pregnant nudes such as Margaret Evans. Neel’s quote speaks once more to the historic representations of women as sexual ‘Olympia-like’ objects of men’s gaze. Neel breaks this mold by honestly showing what is was like to experience pregnancy, highlighting rather than hiding the morphing physical changes and emotional anxiety. (Continued at http://www.americansc.org.uk/Online/Online_2012/neel.html)