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Society portraits that feature chairs like this are not supposed to also show an active old woman, paintbrush in hand, sitting in them nude, all sagging breasts and flabby stomach. In a famous self-portrait from 1980, the elderly artist posed herself on an elegant, bourgeois armchair striped in blue and white - after removing all her clothes. Mary Garrard, the Washington art historian and pioneer of feminist art history, is in it, too, as is artist Faith Ringgold, whose work is about both blackness and womanhood, alongside a slew of female curators and thinkers who helped advance the cause of women in art and of women in the world.ДЄll these 'marginal' figures get treated to the same elite format, brushwork and color that you'd see in any 'advanced' society portrait of the same era.ДЄ few of Neel's paintings deliberately highlight the gap between well-mannered style and radical subject. The 'establishment' that's set up in her work includes figures such as Adrienne Rich, the great American poet, feminist and lesbian activist, as well as a Haitian cleaning woman posed with her retarded female child. In the portrait gallery of Neel's art, all that changes. What you won't get in any such assembly, in the normal course of things, is much chance that a good number of those sitters will be women.

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At least a few such sitters have always favored a more 'modern' portrait style - with a patch of blank canvas here, some wild brushwork there, even the occasional touch of unnatural color or distorted form. You can find something close to Neel's late manner in almost any suite of portraits of political or academic bosses from the past 50 years or so. It let her give women - even the very most radical of them - the same treatment that big-shot men had always gotten.

That's why Neel's shift to a mainstream portrait style, around 1960, was such a good move. By claiming the difficulties of female life as a subject for the vanguard, she was also keeping it on the sidelines - just where it had always been consigned by mainstream artistic culture. Much more important, by painting women in the styles of an esoteric modern avant-garde, she was committing her sitters and their experience to a marginal position. If influential originality was what she was after, she must have known these first paintings weren't going to get her there. Neel's style is interesting, even idiosyncratic, but it's built on other people's innovations. These early pictures do their job, but there are also problems with them. Even Neel's 'straight' nudes from this period hint that living inside a woman's unruly flesh must not be a lot of fun. Neel, who had just joined New York's bohemia, is said to have admired her sitter's liberated ways, but you'd never know it from the picture's angstful forms and tones.ДЄ picture of a woman who has just given birth, painted in 1939, makes her look as if she's just been through Picasso's misogynist meat grinder - except Picasso used cheery colors when he pulled apart his lovers' bodies, whereas Neel's new mom is all grim browns and blood-clot red. That carnal Madonna, painted in 1930, reveals the perils encountered by any woman who dared unleash her sexuality. Growing up amid bourgeois restraint on Philadelphia's Main Line, Neel knew this well.

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(It's hard to get a full sense of this period because a pile of her work was destroyed in 1934 by an enraged boyfriend.) They use the new techniques of radical modernism - the charged color and line of expressionism, cubist dismemberings, surrealist distortion - to do a powerful job of revealing the world women faced when Neel was young.ДЄ 1927 watercolor uses a childlike style and comic-strip format to show the tedium of Babbittish American domestic life. Many of Neel's early pictures are of and about women. It gets at what makes Neel's art important and at why it's her later art that matters most. The show's focus on women isn't just a nod to this museum's mandate. The strange thing is, it's the tame-looking later works that have real weight and that have mattered in the long run.ДЄn important new show called 'Alice Neel's Women' at the National Museum of Women in the Arts has assembled almost 70 of Neel's female portraits. Alice Neel was born in January 1900 and lived for much of the 20th century.ДЇor the first 30 years of her adult career, she painted angst-ridden, radically distorted works: 'Degenerate Madonna' shows a carnal woman with serpent breasts surrounded by the ghosts of her aborted babies.ДЇor the next 30 years, right up to her death in 1984, Neel painted mild-mannered portraits with a vaguely modern slant - the kind of thing favored by sitters who know enough to like Matisse but want a dose of old-fashioned realism, too.