"Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, no. 2"
1967
oil on canvas
60 x 50 in

"Although the vast majority of Neel's late work depicting women continues to focus on single figures, in the last decades of her life she occasionally undertook double portraits of adults, many of them art world figures as well. Neel's interest in painting couples may have been affected by the evolution of her own thinking about the nature of relationships. Like a therapist or family counselor, Neel used formal structure to tell a couple about their relationship. Artists Mimi Gross and Red Grooms fail to touch as they peer distractedly away from each other. Grooms, who admired Neel for her X-ray vision and "that killer line that describes everything." was initially unaware of the emotional distance between himself and his wife, but as he later noted, the painting of the two of them grew increasingly more telling, "especially in light of the fact that Mimi and I broke up."

(from "Alice Neel: Mirror of Identity" by Carolyn Carr - essay in Alice Neel: Women, ISBN 0-8478-2480-2