Neel was one of the 20th century’s foremost practitioners of figurative painting. Working from life, she created provocative and often disarmingly frank portraits of friends and acquaintances in her New York studio. Neel made only a small number of prints during her career and was well into her seventies when she began to explore printmaking in earnest. In this portrait of her daughter-in-law Nancy—seated on a table, perhaps in the artist’s studio—the sense of immediacy is almost palpable. Neel drew quickly onto the metal plate with a greasy lithographic crayon, using the tip of the crayon for contour lines and the broad edge to indicate shading. Once the image was chemically fixed to the plate, it was inked and run through a printing press with a sheet of paper, a process that allows for multiple impressions.

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