In one of her more painterly and complimentary portraits, “Elenka,†1936, Neel paid considerable attention to the sitter’s white blouse, while zeroing in on her handsome, olive complexioned face. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Alice Neel called herself “a collector of souls,” an accurate description of one of this country’s most original and provocative Twentieth Century portraitists. Combining psychological acuity and an unsparing style, she created a body of candid, yet empathetic likenesses. Her large, boldly outlined figures reflect an intense study of modern times, characterized by loneliness and struggle.

“Alice Neel: Painted Truths,” on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, through June 15, documents her remarkably compelling portraits. Organized by the host museum, with guest curators Jeremy Lewison (Neel expert) and Barry Walker (an MFA curator), the exhibition showcases nearly 70 of Neel’s unflinching “pictures of people” who are poor, afflicted, minorities, left-wing activists, art people, friends, lovers and families.

Neel (1900‱984) was born into a wealthy suburban Philadelphia family, trained at what is now Moore College of Art and Design, and became a painter with a strong social conscience and firm left-wing beliefs. Living in Greenwich Village in the 1930s, she painted urban scenes for the Works Progress Administration and portraits of leftist artists, writers and union leaders.

Moving to Spanish Harlem in 1938, she painted the Hispanic community, people she encountered on the streets and casual acquaintances. From the 1960s on, in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Neel fashioned a place in the art world through a series of vivid portraits of artists, performers, curators and critics, as well as black activists and feminists.

During the Depression, working in her studio from onsite sketches, Neel painted cityscapes that evoked the anxiety, isolation and rigors of urban living in hard times. In “Ninth Avenue El,†1935, she employed a sort of faux-primitive style to depict the gloomy scene from beneath the elevated railroad station at Manhattan’s Hudson and Fourteenth Streets. Private collection, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.

Along the way, while raising two sons, she endured a divorce, erratic lovers, the death of one daughter and separation from another, a nervous breakdown, a suicide attempt and neglect by the art establishment. Through it all, she painted likenesses with an intensity, intimacy, perception and emotion that finally made her a celebrity in the last decade of her life.

The exhibition first examines how Neel employed allegory to express empathy for New York City’s poor, her identification with the labor movement and her grief over the fates of her daughters. Standouts include frank images of Jose Negron, who fathered a son, Richard, while living with Neel in the mid-1930s and then deserted her for another woman, and Negron’s gaunt, bedridden brother, with a bandaged chest and hollow eyes.

Neel’s more traditional, realistic likenesses †so-called “essential portraits” †feature intensely observed sitters, including novelist “Max White,” an attractive woman, “Elenka,” and Neel’s young son Richard.

In her “psychological portraits,” Neel sought to integrate the emotions and life experiences of sitters into their portraits. Highlight: her celebrated view of Andy Warhol looking pale, flabby and vulnerable, stripped to the waist, exposing scars of his 1968 gunshot wounds.

Neel blazed new trails with frank, revealing paintings of male and female nudes together, and candid views of pregnant women in all their glory †and discomfort. In “Pregnant Woman,†1971, she showed her daughter-in-law Nancy shortly before she gave birth to twins, in an image conveying sickness, isolation and depression. Nancy’s husband shares her angst by proxy, via a drawing above her head. Estate of Alice Neel.

Neel used her keen visual memory for some subjects, including New Deal arts administrator Audrey McMahon, and young art critic Dore Ashton, whom Neel hoped would promote her career.

As she moved about the city, Neel painted genre scenes and cityscapes, including Depression-era views of Greenwich Village, sparsely populated by isolated, anonymous figures; images from confining tenements in Spanish Harlem; and sunnier, more expansive, Hopper-like depictions from her Upper West Side period.

Neel pushed the envelope in her nude portraits, depicting specific individuals who happened not to be wearing clothes rather than professional models. Instead of idealizing them, she exaggerated imperfections in wrinkled, sagging and hairy likenesses. Her nude couples and pregnant nude women are particularly daring and unique.

The artist depicted mothers and children with unusual directness, never sentimentalizing them and accentuating their imperfections, whether they were relatives, friends or strangers.

“Sam†of 1958 captures the abrasive, standoffish nature of Neel’s longtime lover, Sam Brady, father of her son, Hartley. Even after they broke up, she could count on this photographer/filmmaker to support her work. Estate of Alice Neel.

As she aged, Neel painted candid likenesses of older people, including the frail twin artists Raphael and Moses Soyer, and herself, wearing only her glasses, at 80.

As this exhibition demonstrates, Alice Neel used her singular artistic vision to paint the truth as she saw it, leaving a rich visual history of her times, and earning a special place in American art history.

After closing in Houston, the exhibition travels to Whitechapel Gallery, London (July 8⁓eptember 17) and Moderna Museet Malmo, Sweden (October 9⁊anuary 2, 2011).

The 296-page, fully illustrated exhibition catalog is published by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and distributed by Yale University Press. It sells for $65, hardcover.

The Museum of Fine Arts is at 1001 Bissonnet. For information, www.mfah.org or 713-639-7300.