Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Richard in the Era of the Corporation
Alice Neel American
Not on view
Neel believed that this portrait of her older son, who was employed by Pan Am Airways at the time, captured an era when "the corporation enslaved all these bright young men." Dressed in a navy suit, Richard returns the viewer’s gaze plainly with greenish, somewhat sickly shadows defining his face, both sides of which are visible due to his reflection in profile in the mirror behind him. The painting’s restrained, mostly cool palette discreetly evokes a joyless state of being, reflective of the artist’s belief that capitalism was dehumanizing.