Alice Neel’s drawings from the McCarthy-era trial go to auction

Some of Alice Neel’s most politically charged drawings, made during one of the Cold War’s most notorious trials, will go under the hammer: the auction house Freeman’s has put up for sale “Judge Medina – Trial Scene” (1951–52), the artist’s ink and gouache on paper drawing dedicated to the trial of the leaders of the Communist Party of the USA, as Hyperallergic reports.

In 1949, Neel was sent by the Marxist monthly magazine “Masses & Mainstream” to cover the nine-month trial of the chairman of the American Communist Party, Eugene Dennis, and ten other communist leaders, accused under the Smith Act of conspiring to violently overthrow the American government. The trial was led by federal judge Harold Medina, and in October 1949 the accused were sentenced to five years in prison each and a fine of $10,000 — a decision that the Supreme Court upheld in June 1951. The process, widely followed by the press, became a symbol of the second anti-communist scare (1947–1957) and turned Judge Medina into a national hero.

Neel, who had joined the Communist Party as early as 1935, captured this historic moment with her satirical brush. Among the characters depicted is the virulent anti-communist witness Angela Calomaris, whom Neel contemptuously called a “stool pigeon” (informer). In the drawing “Judge Medina – Trial Scene,” the judge is depicted with four hands (!), which do not merely scratch his head, but express his frustration and despair at the behaviour of the defence lawyers. Freeman’s lot page also quotes the artist’s own saying: “I joined the Party several times… you know what I am, I’m an anarchic humanist.”

The work’s provenance makes the story even more special: the drawing was given by the artist herself to her close friend, Philip Bonosky, a lifelong committed communist, who at Neel’s urging organised in 1981 an exhibition of her work in the Soviet Union, only three years before her death. The work now comes up for sale from a private collection in New York.

Interest in this lot comes at a moment when Neel’s market is experiencing a renaissance: the artist who spent most of her life on the margins of the art world because of her political beliefs and the thick file the FBI opened on her is today one of the most sought-after figurative painters of the 20th century.