Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President’s Council on Bioethics

W hile most of the art world turned to abstraction towards the middle of the twentieth century, Philadelphia-born Alice Neel (1900-1984) courageously chose to remain a figure painter.Occasionally she painted the rich and famous-artists, playwrights, scientists, even a papal nuncio-but mostly her subjects were the unnoticed, the overlooked, the difficult.They were her neighbors in Spanish Harlem: stay-at-home mothers, pregnant mothers, door-to-door salesmen, restaurant workers, tradesmen.Nor did she shy away from those most would rather not confront-a dying, querulous old woman, a middle-aged man in the late stages of cancer, a young man ravaged by tuberculosis.But whether her subjects are young, old, famous, unknown, nude or clothed, Neel's gift was to reveal their common denominator: an ineffable, undefinable, invisible human quality we call dignity.