1940, Alice Neel, T.B. Harlem -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the label at the National Museum of Women in the Arts: In this empathetic but difficult image, Neel depicts Carlos Negrón, the brother of her beau, José Santiago. Negrón, twenty-four years old here, moved to New York’s Spanish Harlem from his native Puerto Rico two years earlier. Tuberculosis spread easily in crowded urban neighborhoods, and in 1940 the only available treatments were drastic. The bandage on Negrón’s chest covers the wound from his thoracoplasty, a procedure that collapsed and “rested” tuberculosis-infected lungs by removing ribs.
1940, Alice Neel, T.B. Harlem -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) (special exhibition)
From the label at the National Museum of Women in the Arts: In this empathetic but difficult image, Neel depicts Carlos Negrón, the brother of her beau, José Santiago. Negrón, twenty-four years old here, moved to New York’s Spanish Harlem from his native Puerto Rico two years earlier. Tuberculosis spread easily in crowded urban neighborhoods, and in 1940 the only available treatments were drastic. The bandage on Negrón’s chest covers the wound from his thoracoplasty, a procedure that collapsed and “rested” tuberculosis-infected lungs by removing ribs.