Alice Neel versus Alex Katz

There can be few more opposing forces in the same field as portraitists Alex Katz and Alice Neel. These two poles-apart American painters also represent wider divisions in art: between stardom and obscurity, between male and female, abstraction and figuration, slickness and grit… I could go on. The stereotype of the masculine artist who blusters his way to the top while the meek woman waits to be discovered is not quite the case here, although Neel was 70 before the winds of fashion blew her way (she died less than 15 years later in 1984). Yet Katz, also an octogenarian but still going strong, has always been in the up-stream.

A spiky non-conformist, Neel painted awkward, almost cartoonishly ugly portraits of subcultural New Yorkers - the communists, cross-dressers and art critics of Greenwich Village. So hard is it to warm to her anachronistic odd-bods that none of the influential art worlders she portrayed (such as the writer and MoMA curator Frank O'Hara or the head honcho of American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Henry Geldzahler) ever gave her so much as a favourable review or an exhibition.

Her early, angsty works are even tougher to look at - following the loss of two children in the '20s, Neel painted dark, screaming pleas for help before she was institutionalised after a mental breakdown. Later, she dropped her symbolist tic of depicting people alongside the trappings of their trade or dreamy evocations of their tormented souls, in favour of full-frontal portraits, focusing square on the face, with only marginal details - such as a clenched fist, blackened fingernail or a thumb hooked into a belt loop - giving any outward clues as to character traits. Neel's art is often described as psychological, somehow seeing into a person's very being, but I prefer to see her subjects as unflatteringly as she saw their crooked noses or bulging veins: as part of a painfully honest vision of the world.

The ultimate portrait cliché is that the eyes follow you around the room, and so it is with Neel's beadily staring cast. Only Andy Warhol averts his gaze, the mega-famous artist looking more vulnerable and less self-important than ever (it seems Neel had a kindred spirit in someone else who liked to hide behind their work). Yet it's the wobbling lines - never straight, often crudely drawn - that really activates Neel's show at the Whitechapel, her erring outlines perhaps mimicking the fragility of human nature itself. She turns the brushes on herself for a stunning 1980 'Self-Portrait' in which she, like so many of her sitters, appears naked as the day she was born - only older, flabbier, frailer. Even the artist's dying mother can't escape the Neel glare: 'Last Sickness' shows Alice senior trapped uncomfortably in her red housecoat.

Where Neel gives you the ugly reality of crow's feet, awkward gestures or a funny squint, Alex Katz is all smooth skin and polished surfaces. Bearing in mind that Neel was unpopular in her prime precisely because everyone else was following the freeform exploits of Jackson 'Jack The Dripper' Pollock at the time, then the way Katz appropriated the colour field approach of later abstract expressionists meant that he was at least speaking the same language as the heroic artists of the day, never mind that he was also the right gender.

Katz became something of a latter-day society portraitist, the official face of New York people-painting to Neel's seedy underbelly. In his much smaller display at the National Portrait Gallery, Katz presents some recent larger-than-life portraits and a cocktail party installation of cut-out heads, titled 'One Flight Up' from 1968. Everyone's here - influential friends of Katz such as poet John Ashbery, critic Irving Sandler and the same Henry Geldzahler that sat for Neel - but it seems we're not invited, as most of the assembled great-and-the-good seem coolly detached or too deep in conversation to engage the viewer for long.
This was the kind of Upper East Side NY intelligentsia and well-heeled socialite crowd that Neel shunned in favour of what she called her 'real people' in Spanish Harlem, which perhaps gives some hint as to why Katz described Neel coming across as 'an angry housewife' in a recent interview. Yet for all his painterly bravado, the big man makes no attempt to reveal anything of the movers and shakers in his pictures, especially so in Katz's lemon-cheesecake, sweetness-and-light portrait of US Vogue editor Anna Wintour - his is the aesthetic equivalent of superficial artworld chit-chat. A female painter of emotionally acute portraits was hardly going to get noticed alongside the swinging dicks of the American art world, but sometimes you can see why Alice Neel chose the path of most resistance.