Alice Neel died on October 13, 1984, in New York City at age 84, shortly after completing her final self-portrait.
Alice Neel died on October 13, 1984, in New York City at the age of 84, following complications from cancer. She had continued working almost until the end of her life, having completed one of her most celebrated paintings, a nude Self-Portrait (1980), just a few years earlier at age 80—an unusually candid and unidealized depiction of an elderly woman's body that broke new ground in the history of self-portraiture.
By the time of her death, Neel had achieved the widespread recognition that had eluded her for much of her career. The feminist art movement of the 1970s had rediscovered her as a pioneering figure who painted women, pregnant nudes, and marginalized subjects with unprecedented honesty. Major museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art had mounted retrospectives of her work during her lifetime, and she was invited to the White House in 1979 to be honored, along with other women, for lifetime achievement in the arts.
Her death marked the end of a career that spanned over six decades, during which she remained committed to figurative painting even as abstraction dominated the American art world for much of the mid-twentieth century. Her legacy has only grown since her death, with major retrospectives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2021), the Whitney Museum, and international institutions cementing her status as one of the most important American portraitists of the twentieth century.