LONDON.- The Whitechapel Gallery presents the first major retrospective of influential 20th century American painter Alice Neel. Alice Neel (1900–1984) is best known for her portraits of celebrated artists and writers from New York, including Andy Warhol, Frank O’Hara, Meyer Shapiro and Linda Nochlin. A self-proclaimed ‘collector of souls’, she painted friends, family and neighbours in the Manhattan district of Spanish Harlem, delving into their personalities with rare frankness. Undeterred by a turbulent personal life that included a year of hospitalisation following a nervous breakdown, and the destruction in 1934 of over 250 paintings and drawings, it was only in her later years that she gained widespread recognition. At a time when New York witnessed the birth of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art, Alice Neel pursued the less fashionable discipline of painting people, and was