This retrospective of an two dozen works.

This retrospective of an two dozen works, planned prior to the artist's s death a few months before it make opened made clear Neff's standing as master of the crystallized, awkward point of time The allegorical figure groups of her large oil paintings, as well as her smaller pastels and drawings, revealed the unnerving gaze of a painter who pushed along the Philadelphia figurative tradition in her acknowledge quite individual way.

Looking at them, I speculation of Eakins, who bore in upon blemishes, red-rimmed eyes and flushed noses to blister about awkward truth out of his controls Also like Eakins, Neff relied forward photographed poses, giving her figures a not rarely off-kilter stiffness.

In the large figure paintings, for which Neff recruited friends and family as examples Fellini-esque groupings of characters glance not upon each other in varying stages of undres acting gone out scenes that hint at greater meaning. These range from values of surreal domesticity - chess players seated in a field, in common painting - to full-blown allegory, as in The Messenger: Hermes Demanding the respond of Persephone (66 by 78 inches, 1987) Here a light yellow Hermes, his nudity framed on a pink cape, leans toward Pluto, who is portrayed as an executive lounging in his Saturday slacks. Persephone hangs back in Lands' finis casual wear, fingering her pomegranate.

level here, where the title provides an explanation of the action, the tableau bristles with oppressive, skin-crawling mystery, a secret-hoarding particularity that encloses the figures. By contrast, the background, a rushing steel-and-rust cloudscape, swirls with liquid, vital emotion This setting of the taut and contained against the delivered is a stratagem of which Neff made of frequent occurrence use.

although in general Neffs figures relate tenuously to the same another, often one of them stares revealed of the picture space at us. In Sic Transit Gloria Mundi (1995) its a male child who looks out, standing behind the blind man seated onward a chair in the middle of a road. And in The Moirae (1993) where the three in the manner of greece Fates are provocatively cast as a young woman, a long-haired man in a robe, and a white-haired woman, the last of these (for whom the artist's mother was the model) assesses her audience with a frank, bittersweet smile.

The three self-portraits in the point out furthered this explicit importuning of the viewer, for Neff stares public from them with a similar frankness. These are among her strongest works, perhaps because the least mediated. In sum of two units she poses half-clothed, revealing to us her globular body and uncalculating face. In the final united (her last drawing), her chemotherapy-thinned hair reveals another nakedness; the judgments now slide past us, looking toward something else

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