Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Fish Market
Alice Neel American
Not on view
This bustling scene of daily life in Spanish Harlem depicts La Marqueta, the indoor marketplace under the railroad tracks on Park Avenue between 111th and 116th Streets that was built in 1936 as a New Deal project to improve public hygiene through the consolidation of street vendors and pushcarts. The painting captures the atmosphere of a quotidian scene in Neel’s local community, attentively portraying its ethnic diversity while perceptively recording the range of subtle expressions and gestures animating the activities underway. The elevated vantage point allowed Neel to confine the human activity in the lower half of the composition, further emphasizing the density of the bustling crowd, while in the painting’s upper half she could explore the market’s interior architecture and contrasting patterns of glazing and tiling.
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