Alice Neel On Sale

On 1stDibs, you can find the most appropriate alice neel on sale for your needs in our varied inventory. Adding a alice neel on sale to a room that is mostly decorated in warm neutral tones can yield a welcome change — find a piece on 1stDibs that incorporates elements of beige, black, gray, white and more. These artworks were handmade with extraordinary care, with artists most often working in lithograph. A large alice neel on sale can prove too dominant for some spaces — a smaller alice neel on sale, measuring 28.5 high and 21.5 wide, may better suit your needs.

The average selling price for a alice neel on sale we offer is $8,933, while they’re typically $4,000 on the low end and $19,600 for the highest priced.

As one of the 20th century’s most influential American artists, Alice Neel was a champion of social justice, which served as a lifelong inspiration for her portraits and figurative paintings.

Born in 1900 in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, Neel grew up in a strict middle-class family that did not support her artistic ambitions. Undaunted, Neel enrolled in the fine arts program at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women — now the Moore College of Art and Design — where she trained with Ashcan School artist George Harding in 1921. 

In 1924, Neel furthered her art studies for a period at the Chester Springs summer school of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. There, she met her husband, Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez. After they married, they moved to Cuba and had a daughter. When they returned to the United States to live in New York, in 1927, their infant daughter died from diphtheria. By 1930, the couple’s marriage had disintegrated and Neel suffered another blow when Enríquez took their second child to live with him in Cuba. She experienced a nervous breakdown, and her trauma led to an enduring theme of loss, motherhood and anxiety in her paintings.   

Living in Greenwich Village and then uptown, Neel endured additional difficult relationships but immersed herself in her work. She secured a job with the Works Progress Administration, painting urban scenes and portraits of left-wing writers, artists and trade unionists. In 1938, she moved to Spanish Harlem, where she painted stark and honest still-lifes and portraits of friends, family and neighbors. Neel continued to make representational work even as the art world in New York City became enveloped in trendy Abstract Expressionism.

In 1951, Neel had her first solo exhibition showing 17 paintings at the A.C.A. Gallery. That same year, New York’s New Playwrights Theater exhibited 24 of her works, where she was hailed “a pioneer of socialist-realism in American painting.” 

In 1960, Neel moved to the Upper West Side and made portraits of public figures such as poet Frank O’Hara, Andy Warhol and artist Robert Smithson. 

Neel exhibited widely throughout the U.S. during the 1970s and was championed by art critics and feminist activists. She was honored with a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. In 1980, her Self-Portrait was shown for the first time in the collection “Selected 20th Century American Self-Portraits” at the Harold Reed Gallery.

Neel’s legacy as a humanist lives on long after her death in 1984. In 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted a retrospective exhibition of her work. 

On 1stDibs, discover a range of original Alice Neel paintings and prints.

Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

Find fine art prints for sale on 1stDibs today.