Alice Neel, self-portrait, image via npr.org

Alice Neel's figures live in their heads. The untidy flesh below is a burdensome afterthought. What Amiri Barka called the ''sad meat of the body" is the price of being alive.

When she began painting in the '20s, nobody noticed. Neglect continued as more or less a constant for another half century. Not until feminist art critics in the '70s took up her cause did her work start to surface outside a small circle of friends. By the time she died in '84 at the age of 84, her awkward figures had elbowed their way into the mainstream.

Nobody praised her tact. She called male artists who painted seductive female nudes without depicting pregnancies (''sex without results") sissies. Women who took pains with their appearance were wasting their lives. She favored the unraveled look. Style was a fighting word, because she was always out of it in art. Her theme was character and social standing – ''what the world has done to (people), and their retaliation."

Jackson Pollock didn't work her side of the street, but he could have been quoting from her playbook when he observed that "Modernism seemed to offer women a fiction in which universals and absolutes could be pursued in freedom from the messy business of gender relations."

Neel made art from the messy business of gender relations. Her content was fixed, and so were her working methods. She'd let subjects seat themselves and get comfortable. Then she'd rough in an outline, fill the body with color and engage with the sitter's expression. She liked to paint people as if the frame barely contained them. Their power comes from the fluid force of their shape and the intensity of their gaze. Their hands and feet are often sketchy, even malformed. Late in her life she frequently failed to fill the outline of shoes or give a hand all its fingers.

Alice Neel, mother and children, image via commericalappeal.com

What changed and evolved was her approach to painting. In her mature style, she saved little of the expressionism of her youth. After her mid-60s, her color passages became flat and unmoulated, with energy in the outlines.

People she favored she tended to outline in blue; others in black. Herself she outlined in electric blue, nude in her 80s. Her breasts are flat and fallen, her belly bloated. Yet she turns to the viewer with triumphant self-approval, holding a paint brush and pausing, ever so briefly, from the work of her life.

Her grandson, the filmmaker Andrew Neel, pays her tribute in a much-praised documentary that screens at the Northwest Film Forum May 16-22.

More about Alice Neel the movie here.