nd mirror--spare as a ballet studio. The golden glow of the hardwood floor and velvet chair seems to confirm the radiance and majesty of the mother-to-be. But the picture is not one of pure joy, complicated as it is by the reflection in the corner behind her. Mirrors in portraits have long served to provide additional or conflicting information to that conveyed by the sitter. Here, the fatigue and consternation in Evans's profile reveal the psychic aspects of motherhood that are usually left unremarked, as if they were characteristics that maternity clothes could hide. The reflection also seems to allude to the generational procession of motherhood, for the woman in the mirror seems strangely older than the Margaret Evans who looks at us. Is it her own mother? Or perhaps the mother she will eventually become? Neel was 78 when she painted Evans. By this point, the artist was something of a cult figure within the feminist and art communities. But like so many women artists and writers of her generation and of those before it, Neel had entered the limelight late in life. When she was 62, an age at which her male counterparts were getting valedictory retrospectives, the first major article about her appeared, in this magazine. It was titled, with no irony whatsoever, "Introducing the Portraits of Alice Neel"--portraits she had been painting in near obscurity for over 30 years. During the course of the 1960s and 70s, Neel delightedly watched society catch up with her--a fiercely dedicated painter who had raised two sons without the support of a husband and who was pursuing a genre decidedly out of fashion. While Neel provided a model for the kind of life that some women were then emulating, the women's movement had a reciprocal effect on Neel's own art. No better evidence exists than her portraits of pregnant nudes. It was a subject she first approached in 1964, ultimately painting a total of seven such port...
