Denver museum focusing on American art, life in New York City

DENVER -- A museum that has drawn big crowds with exhibitions of masterpieces by European artists will celebrate American art and paintings of life and death in New York City.

The Denver Art Museum will be showing a collection of paintings by iconoclast Alice Neel, works from the Cos Cob Art Colony of American Impressionists, and some of the private collection of Western art the Harmsen family recently donated.

The first to open is a tribute to Neel and the multicultural human landscape of New York as seen from her apartments in Greenwich Village, Spanish Harlem and the upper West Side. Anyone who dropped by was likely to become the subject of a portrait.

Neel grew up in Philadelphia and moved to New York in 1927. While others focused on abstract expressionism, Neel was all too real. But she only began to receive national critical acclaim in the 1960s, after she began focusing on painting New York artists, including Andy Warhol.

The Denver show, which runs through Dec. 30, includes more than 80 paintings, watercolors and drawings selected by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.