Alice Neel specialized in painting 20th century American women and could do cute kids and attractive teenagers. She had more unusual interests, too: old ladies and pregnant young women.

One of the most striking of the older women is her mother, enveloped in a vivid plaid dressing gown and despondent at 86 with complications from a broken hip. Called "Last Sickness," the picture recalls that the artist nursed her mother through the end of her life.

Neel's self-portrait at the age of 81, three years before she died, features white hair, rimless glasses and pursed lips. Seated in a striped armchair, a paint rag in one hand and a brush in the other, she is nude.

"Alice Neel: Women," an exhibit of 64 portraits that opens Friday at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, contains many nudes. Some are heavily distorted and sexually explicit, and her pregnant nudes are so specific that they usually have the name of the expectant mother as part of the title.

"I'm not against the abstractionists," Neel told the author of a monograph on her work. "What I can't stand is that abstractionists pushed all the other pushcarts off the street."

Neel experienced hard times in the early 1930s: a broken marriage, a nervous breakdown and abusive lovers, one of whom destroyed much of her work. She began to exhibit in groups and worked briefly with the New Deal's Public Works of Art Project. Even after she began having one-woman shows, she collected welfare until the mid-1950s.

Though Neel is not associated with the radical abstractionists in painting, she had many friends who were unconventional and radical in other ways: novelist Jack Kerouac, poet Allen Ginsberg and other writers of the Beat Generation. She appeared with several of them in the 1959 cult film "Pull My Daisy."

She also drew the attention of FBI agents in 1955 because of her activities with the Communist Party. She had illustrated a story by a writer on the Daily Worker, and some of her pictures appeared in a periodical called Masses and Mainstream.

Her fortunes improved in the 1960s when she acquired an annual stipend of $6,000 from a psychiatrist friend, a $3,000 award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and regular representation by the Graham Gallery, which gave her several solo exhibits.

Greater recognition came in the 1970s when her portrait of feminist author Kate Millett appeared on the cover of Time magazine in an issue devoted to "The Politics of Sex." She got an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and a retrospective exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Celebrity status followed with a portrait of New York's Mayor Edward Koch and, in 1984, the year of her death, two appearances on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts is coupling the Neel show with one on the work of May Stevens. Her paintings, in an exhibit called "The Water Remembers," differ greatly from Neel's, though they were friends and shared an ardent feminism.

"We spent a lot of time together in the '70s, demonstrating outside New York museums because work by women was only about 1 percent of their collections," Stevens said in an interview.

The exhibit features 13 large paintings and 14 works on paper. Her most recent painting is an imaginative representation of the confluence of two rivers in Lithuania, homeland of her late husband, fellow artist Rudolph Baranik. She estimated it at 14 feet by 6 1/2 feet, painted in somber, flowing blues and grays. Scattered in it are bright yellow bits of amber.

Her husband told her of picking up and skipping bits of the jewel-like amber across the surface of the water when he was a boy. "They only saved a piece of amber when there was a bug imbedded in it," Stevens said.

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