Face versus body, the mind in spite of the physique, or perhaps the life itself: that seems a steady fascination.

In the Barbican’s final room, a portrait of Gus Hall, leader of the Communist Party USA, sits beside one of porn activist Annie Sprinkle in full fetish gear. Or take Neel’s own self-portrait, which she didn't come round to painting until she was 80 years old. Ashton as an example: Ashton is exposed and uncomfortable, crouching down with a glint of fear in her eye. You can see superficial similarities to Lucian Freud in the work, a way of painting flesh that is somehow not static or artificial in its rendering, but alive, falling, rolling.

The subject of Alice Neel’s painting Marxist Girl (Irene Peslikis) (1972)—a founder of the New York Feminist Art Institute—presides over a worn purple chair like a self-possessed sovereign of bohemia. She painted the poverty and squalor of Harlem where she lived in the 1930s and 40s, and which she described as ‘a battlefield of humanism’, her painting TB Harlem testament to the brutal treatment of the raging tuberculosis epidemic there. You see the good and bad, the highs and lows, the streets and the lecture theatres of New York all thrown together without barriers or boundaries. Her eclectic line-up of portraits from this era includes many figures whom she admired for their political commitments: from the Marxist filmmaker Sam Brody, who became her partner and the father of her son Hartley, to the communist intellectual Harold Cruse.

Sure, artists had painted people for centuries, millennia even, but in a time of wild, gestural, emotional artistic experimentation, Neel’s portraiture dragged the focus back down to earth, back to the homes, the bedrooms and the streets of everyday people. It’s hard not to think that such a description would have pleased her; indeed, when two agents came to her door, she asked them to sit for a painting. We abide by the Editors’ Code of Practice and are committed to upholding the highest standards of journalism. It never betrays Neel by sidestepping the graceless, sorry or awkward in her art, just as she never ignored it in life.

It was important therefore to represent human beings in painting and create especially a space for those who otherwise went unseen. She persisted with her distinctive, expressionistic style, even though it meant that for most of her life she lacked material comfort, let alone critical recognition. Peslikis’s right leg hangs over the armrest while her curling right arm shows off an unshaven armpit. These are people allowing themselves to be painted, and each picture represents a letting-in, a moment of intimacy.

Neel presumably paints him because he is a subject whose commitment to class struggle she thinks worthy of representation. Speaking on her pregnant nudes, Neel said, “It isn’t what appeals to me, it’s just a fact of life… I feel as a subject it’s perfectly legitimate, and people out of a false modesty, or being sissies, never show it… Something that primitives did, but modern painters have shied away from because women were always done as sexual objects.Neel communicates well the hardship and trauma weighing on her subjects through distracted eyes or even a slump of the shoulders. The artist, who described herself as “the collector of souls”, moved to Harlem in the early 1940s with a nightclub owner. on the other hand, was made in half a day: O’Hara looks crippled by the anxiety of a hangover and the lilacs have withered.

Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is the largest exhibition to date in the UK of the work of American artist Alice Neel (1900–1984). These early-ish paintings are dark and weird, capturing the bohemian eccentricity of downtown New York. Remarkably, her work has been little seen in the UK, making this a wonderfully exciting opportunity for visitors here to experience the extraordinary power of her work.Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, Neel’s own existence was financially precarious, and she was reliant on government welfare to support her and her two sons. Here are her paintings of the Uneeda biscuit factory strikes in 1936, police bearing down on workers, innocent children picked out in blood red. She paints the poor communities of her adopted home with tender sadness and absolutely heaps of empathy.