Portraiture was a bourgeois concept to the late American painter Alice Neel. She preferred to describe her work as “pictures of people.” These pictures, painted in her signature style of detailed figuration with abstract flourishes, evade the kinds of commercial appeal that made portraits so marketable to the rich. Her oeuvre did not shamelessly flatter the wealthy — it was an archive of the everyday people in her life.

For all the celebrities and political figures she painted, Neel portrayed them as they would appear to the common viewer. She practiced a kind of radical humanism in her art, but her commitments to American socialism have long been buried under her contributions to expressionism more generally. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Neel retrospective, People Come First, recontextualizes her career as a people’s painter.

The first comprehensive Neel exhibition in twenty years, People Come First frames her politics through personal experiences — her intimate relationships with people who made history and others who drifted from historical memory. Her subjects ranged from community organizers, civil rights activists, Communist Party leaders, neighbors in Spanish Harlem, and queer artists and performers. Throughout her career, Neel brought underrepresented and oppressed people into the spotlight.