“I really live out my front room windows,” Alice Neel said. “It’s like having a street in your living room.” Born in 1900 in Philadelphia, Neel became a New Yorker in 1927, when she moved to an apartment in the Bronx. In 1932, she relocated to Greenwich Village, and in 1938 to Spanish Harlem. In 1962, she settled on the Upper West Side. Neel never kept a studio, choosing instead to paint at home. When Neel wasn’t making the portraits she’s now known for, she turned her attention to the outdoors, depicting cityscapes and street scenes, many of them infused with her own emotional state. There is a darkness to Harlem River at Sedgwick Avenue, for example, a view framed by the window of her Bronx apartment. She made the painting in 1928, the year after her infant daughter Santillana died of diphtheria. Neel’s visions of New York are collected in this exhibition, which spans the period 1928 to 1981. —Jeanne Malle