Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Kenneth Fearing
Alice Neel American
Sitter Kenneth Fearing American
Not on view
Neel painted several fellow communists throughout her career, including the poet Kenneth Fearing, whom she met shortly after moving to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in 1932. Fearing’s writing championed the disenfranchised—a theme that Neel weaves through the numerous references to his poems surrounding his likeness, including a scene of police brutality, impoverished figures, and an injured soldier. Neel said that Fearing’s “heart bled for the grief of the world,” a sentiment represented here by the skeleton that appears to clutch his heart.
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