Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
T.B. Harlem
Alice Neel American
Not on view
T.B. Harlem is haunting portrait of Carlos Santiago Negrón, the brother of Neel’s lover José , pictured in painful recovery after receiving treatment for tuberculosis, an illness that had a disproportionate impact on poor communities of color, as it does still today. Neel represents Negrón as a contemporary martyr, his bandaged chest a sign of both injury and persecution. He personifies life’s unfairness and cruelty, to which Neel was empathetically drawn in her art.