It made more sense here, Neel was mixing with the flamboyant characters of the New York art scene, including a stripped down, vulnerable Andy Warhol. She holds a paintbrush in one hand, a rag in another, but omits the canvas itself, perhaps to expose the rawness of her being more, to force us to look harder.

Neel invited her subjects into her studio, at this time the bay window of her living room in her apartment at 300 West 107th Street.Much of the French critical reception focuses on the political nature of the exhibition, especially the works’ engagement with American class politics and Neel’s brave depiction of race. But for Neel, having once been a single mother raising her children off welfare, Marxism was ‘her way of understanding her own life’; it’s how she understood the lives of her sitters, too.

Up to this point, Neel had mainly depicted men, but at some point during the 1930s, her focus switched to female nudes. The downstairs galleries at the Barbican are dedicated to highlights of Neel’s later portrait paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, when she made some of her most celebrated work. Peslikis’s right leg hangs over the armrest while her curling right arm shows off an unshaven armpit.Face versus body, the mind in spite of the physique, or perhaps the life itself: that seems a steady fascination. The distracted and forlorn expression on his face, and the hand that holds it up from plunging completely, is rendered in radiant colour; his body remains in outline. It starts in Havana, where Neel moved with her first husband in 1926 – at a time when women still weren’t really meant to paint – with a couple of hazy, sludgy portraits. Before leaving, visitors could see a film of Neel being recognised by and inducted into the American Art establishment.

Neel painted right up to her death and was known to phone friends to exclaim: “Guess what, I’m alive! They are a stark insight into struggle, vulnerability and pain, where the material conditions of living are inscribed on the bodies she paints. Neel’s vibrant portraits are shown alongside archival material from the time, including photography, letters and film.The engaged eye of Neel’s Parisian outing is certainly her own, but it is also a quality of all her subjects who animate a fascinating carousel of honest pictures, touchingly present in their puffed-up eyes and heads, which are invariably about a tenth bigger than they should be.

A daring, courageous and over-talented painter, Alice Neel has now entered the pantheon of the greatest 20th century artists, along with the likes of Dora Maar, Leonora Carrington and Lubaina Himid, for too long overlooked in history books. on the other hand, was made in half a day: O’Hara looks crippled by the anxiety of a hangover and the lilacs have withered. These early-ish paintings are dark and weird, capturing the bohemian eccentricity of downtown New York.In the French financial newspaper Les Echos, Judith Benhamou also focuses on the political nature of portrait painting in the 20th century. I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being in my portraits ,” Neel added. An 80-year-old woman looks back at us wearing nothing but a pair of glasses and a “screw you if you don’t like it” expression.