raits, with Evans's being her last. The subject had a powerful resonance at a time when women were newly educating themselves about the form and function of their anatomies. The Boston Women's Health Book Collective published Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1973, while Adrienne Rich's classic Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution appeared in 1976. As opportunities for women widened dramatically, debate and discussion about their biological destinies and responsibilities intensified. Neel's paintings of pregnant women offered no clear opinions or solutions. But, in retrospect, as with all of Neel's best work, Margaret Evans Pregnant endures as both a portrait of a person and a picture of a time. Ann Temkin is the Muriel and Philip Berman curator of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She organized the Alice Neel exhibition that opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art next month and travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 18 through April 15, 2001....
