Wild Life.(Alice Neel's works )

"All experience is great providing you live through it," Alice Neel said, adding an implied caution: "If it kills you, you've gone too far." She spoke from authority. The great American portrait painter (1900-84), who is the subject of two current New York gallery shows, led the kind of dishevelled life that was thought of, in praise or in blame, as bohemian, before it got stamped dysfunctional. She was a character. Remember characters? Joseph Mitchell published two Profiles in this magazine, in 1942 and in 1964, of a prime specimen, the unwashed Greenwich Village rapscallion Joe Gould, who claimed to be at work on a revolutionary literary opus, "An Oral History of Our Time." Mitchell's fascination eventually became the basis of a movie, "Joe Gould's Secret" (2000), in which Susan Sarandon logged an airy cameo as Alice Neel. In 1933, Neel painted Gould, a casual friend, naked. He grins demonically and sports two uncircumcised penises, with a third dangling from the stool he sits on. For Neel, the savoring of foibles, in herself and in others, was the most reliable entertainment in a life beset by the loss of one baby daughter to diphtheria and another to an absconding husband; a severe mental breakdown; chronic poverty; and the irksomeness, or worse, of assorted lovers. Her invincible commitment to painting won Neel a fitful career in New York, first in Depression-era radical circles--she was briefly a Communist and always a leftist--and then, starting in the nineteen-fifties, after a decade of near-total obscurity, as a living legend. Outlasting insult and condescension, a woman among competitive men, and a figurative artist in times agog for abstraction, she triumphed, and her star continues to rise.

Neel grew up in Colwyn, Pennsylvania, a small town that she hated, in a family dominated by her cultured mother, whom she adored. Her shyly ineffectual father, from a family of opera singers, was a railroad clerk. Neel made art--largely in secret, she said--starting in childhood. After high school, she acquired secretarial skills and landed civil-service jobs. She attended art schools, including the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design), but avoided the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, because she "didn't want to be taught Impressionism, or learn yellow lights and blue shadows. . . . I wasn't happy like Renoir." She met and married an upper-class Cuban artist, Carlos Enriquez, and lived with him in Havana for a year. In 1930, he left her in New York, taking along their surviving daughter (who later killed herself). Neel fell apart. Suicide attempts and hospitalizations, in nightmarish wards, followed. "I died every day," she said of the experience. The spell lifted in the autumn of 1931. The next year, she moved to Greenwich Village, with a sailor, Kenneth Doolittle, who proved a bad bet--he destroyed much of her work in a fit of rage. Then she lived for five years with Jose Santiago Negron, a Puerto Rican night-club performer, who left her soon after the birth of their son, Richard, in 1939. Next was an ill-tempered leftist photographer and critic, Sam Brody. In 1941, they had a son, Hartley, whose son Andrew Neel made a well-received documentary about his grandmother in 2007. In "Selected Works," a show of sixteen portraits, from 1942 to 1982, at David Zwirner, we see Brody grasping a frightened-looking Hartley with a clawlike hand, around 1945, and, in another painting, gloomily reading war news. ("How Like the Winter," that work is subtitled.) Living for twenty years in Spanish Harlem, Neel often made sitters of neighborhood children. "George Arce" (1959), a terrific painterly cadenza, portrays a boy with whom she stayed in touch even after he was imprisoned for murder, in 1974.

"Nudes of the 1930s," the other new show, at Zwirner & Wirth, samples a theme in which Neel excelled, and an epoch of stark poignancies. It includes a watercolor, from 1935, that is the funniest and funkiest visualization of intimacy I know. Cute, blowsy Alice urinates on a toilet while her solemn boyfriend John Rothschild does the same in a ...