Bright Vision

Following in the footsteps of artist Alice Neel, Alex Preston finds endless sources of inspiration in Cuba, from Havana's raw charm to the shimmering shorelines of the Cayos.

I believe in leaving life open to the circumstantial, the happenstance. So it was that, on the advice of a friend, I stuck my head in on the final day of the Alice Neel exhibition, Hot Off the Griddle, at the Barbican last year. Neel was one of those artists who occupied a vague corner of my mind with her New York street scenes, slightly droopy portraits and vibrant colours. I wasn’t prepared for the range and beauty I found in the show, the sense of an artist who was able to bring characters to life in an almost magical fashion. She called herself a “collector of souls”, and said her engagement with the person she was painting was paramount: “I know all the theory of everything, but when I paint, I don’t think of anything except the subject and me.”

Neel painted figures at the margins of society, such as the homeless, prostitutes, or drug addicts. The paintings that stayed with me most from the exhibition, though, were those from the year she spent in Cuba in the mid-1920s following her marriage to the Cuban painter Carlos Enrique. It was clearly a transformative period for Neel —her work was adopted by and exhibited alongside that of the nascent Vanguardia movement in Havana: Paintings characterised by their use of luminous colour, bold forms, and focus on ordinary people rather than the bourgeoisie. It is extraordinary to look at her work before and after her trip to Havana and perceive the depth and complexity that develops after that single annus mirabilis: 1926.