Alice Neel

Like MY ARCHITECT, Nathaniel Kahn's celebrated 2003 film about his father, the architect Louis Kahn, Andrew Neel's fascinating but troubling documentary about his famous grandmother is more than a mere biography of an important 20th-century artist: It's also an intimate portrait of a family member that questions whether or not "great artist" and "good parent" can ever be combined in the same person. The painter Alice Neel dared to defy the conventions of a pre-feminist era to become one of the great artists of her generation, but not with an enormous emotional cost to her self and her family.

Using interviews with friends, art critics and, most importantly,...