The American painter Alice Neel is recognized as one of the consummate modern portraiturists. She believed that portraits should do two things: They should, first, capture the complete person and, second, capture the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. During the sixties, seventies, and eighties, Neel painted a great number of luminaries, including artists Robert Smithson (1962) and Andy Warhol (1970); and dealers and museum curators such as Henry Geldzahler (1967) and Frank O'Hara (1960); as well as musicians, scientists, critics, and other professionals. Historian Patricia Hills refers to these as Neel's "gallery of Zeitgeist notables"

The paintings in the Bell Gallery Collection of The Westreich Family and John Mollenkopf are typical of Neel's mature style. The Westreich Family presents five figures--art consultant Thea Westreich, her husband Stanley, and their three children (Lauren, Dana, and Anthony, from left to right)--seated on a green couch placed in the foreground across the picture plane. John Mollenkopf shows a young man seated barefoot and staring out at the viewer. As always Neel's approach is direct and poignant. Formally, she relied on expressive distortion to capture the physiognomy and body language of her subjects, as well as to render the characters beneath their physical appearance. The figures are described by strong contour lines painted in black or blue. The brushstrokes are long and fluid, curling across the canvas, and the colors are mixed in intense combinations. The compression of the images within the edges of the canvas adds to the paintings' intensity. However, the central power of these paintings lies in their boldness--their honest and captivating presentation of the unusual and weird traits of the human mind and behavior.

Neel's expressionist content is inherited from such artists as Chiam Soutine and Edward Munch, as well as the German "Blue Rider" painters Franz Marc and Ernst Kirchner. She was influenced by the color of the Fauves, and despite her expert draftsmanship, she reduced the role of line, creating flat, broad areas of color pressed close to the surface plain.

Although Neel's early works date to the late-1920s, she was not recognized for her artistic talents until the 1960s. In 1974 she was given a small retrospective at the Whitney Museum, which led to other exhibitions and national awards in the last decade of her life. The first monograph on her work was published in 1983, just one year before her death from cancer. In 2002, the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized the first major traveling retrospective of the artist's work to mark her 100th birthday.