K20 Curator on the One Artwork She’d Live With: Alice Neel’s “The Great Society”
For one curator in Düsseldorf, the fantasy of living with a single artwork isn’t a thought experiment so much as a settled conviction. After years of returning to the work of American painter Alice Neel (1900–1984), she found the answer hanging close to home: “The Great Society” (1965), a major Neel painting recently acquired by K20/K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.
The curator describes Neel’s work as “expressive, arresting, and deeply politically charged,” a combination that makes the choice unusually aligned with both private desire and institutional ambition. “The artwork I would acquire for the museum doesn’t always align with what I would want to live with,” she notes, “but in this case it’s true.”
That overlap is telling. Neel’s portraits, with their unvarnished psychological intensity and social clarity, have long resisted easy categorization: intimate without being sentimental, political without becoming didactic. In the context of a museum collection, “The Great Society” also carries the weight of its moment, invoking the mid-1960s United States and the promises, tensions, and exclusions embedded in that era’s rhetoric.
Asked which cultural experience most decisively reshaped her understanding of art, the curator points to a formative summer in 2007, when several of Europe’s most influential art events converged: the Venice Biennale, Art Basel, Documenta in Kassel, and Skulptur Projekte Münster. As a university student in her final year, she traveled the route from Venice to Basel to Kassel to Münster, looking closely at everything and taking exhaustive notes.
What emerged, she recalls, was a “painfully apparent” lesson in how context scripts meaning. Art behaves differently in a fair than in a biennial; it is received differently at a quinquennial exhibition than in a citywide sculpture program. Each format anticipates its own audiences and rituals, and each quietly signals who belongs — and who does not.
Her current reading habits, too, suggest a mind that moves between intensity and compression. When she is too exhausted to sustain the long arc of a novel, she turns to poetry, revisiting books she has read “a dozen times.” Among the titles she names are Laura Solomon’s “The Hermit,” Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets,” Nate Klug’s “Rude Woods” (described as a modern translation of Virgil’s “Eclogues”), and Kate Colby’s “I Mean.”
The soundtrack of her days is less rarefied than pragmatic: she is listening to “Sheriff Labrador,” she says, through earmuffs and ear plugs, trying to work while parenting at the same time.
And when it comes to the perennial question — what is art for? — she declines to offer a neat thesis. “I know the answer,” she says. “I’m just keeping it for myself.”
The refusal lands as its own kind of curatorial statement: in a field that often demands instant interpretation, some convictions remain private, held close like a painting you’d choose to live with for the rest of your life.
(An exhibition note included alongside the interview highlights “Anne Truitt: Pioneer of Minimal Art” at K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, on view in Düsseldorf through August 2.)
