Alice Neel (1900-1984) - ‘Jackie Curtis and Rita Redd’ Archival Pigment Print, Framed

Details

Description

Alice Neel (1900-1984) - ‘Jackie Curtis and Rita Redd’ Archival Pigment Print, Framed. Signed and dated in plate. Housed under … Read more Alice Neel (1900-1984) - ‘Jackie Curtis and Rita Redd’ Archival Pigment Print, Framed. Signed and dated in plate. Housed under non glare UV filtering acrylic in a new white metal gallery frame. In very good condition.

Size: 34.5 x 25.25 in

Jackie Curtis (1947-1985) was a “Warhol superstar,” a playwright, poet, cabaret singer and theater director. Born John Holder Curtis Jr., he invented the “glam rock” look of wearing glitter around his eyes and retro thrift-shop female fashions. His companion, Ritta Redd, was not a celebrity although he appeared in several films with Curtis. In an exhibition catalog essay for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Richard Flood offers an amusing description of this painting using classic literary characters and real life analogies. “Huddled together like Hansel and Gretel in the presence of the witch,” Flood writes, “these two boys with transgendered dreams sit as if awaiting a court verdict.” Using other well-known tropes, Flood unpacks the subjects’ identities, “Jackie’s shoulder pads hint at an idealized Hollywood pantheon of femme fatales… Redd is a little more complicated. Part Tom Sawyer and part Little Lord Fauntleroy, he is the personification of knowing innocence. Even his awkwardly introverted feet seem oddly available to the advance of Jackie’s insinuatingly positioned right foot, with its open-toed high heel and torn black stocking revealing a curiously aggressive big toe.” In addition to being witty, these comparisons allow us to understand Curtis and Redd in a greater context as characters as well as individuals, as was characteristic of Neel’s work. Flood sums this up by writing, “It is one of those wonderful pictures by Neel that somehow gets much bigger than the subject ostensibly being portrayed.” Thus this portrait of two men dressed in unusual outfits and positioned in dubious poses in fact highlights the loftier questions of gender, sexuality and social roles. See less