A single canvas by Juanita McNeely hangs at the end of a long corridor in the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM), and it outshines the European masters lining the walls on either side. McNeely's portrait of a laboring mother, swathed in glowing fields of chartreuse, stands opposite canonical works by Picasso, André Derain and Max Beckmann—and the confrontation is the curators' point.

McNeely was born in nearby Ferguson, Missouri, and studied at Washington University in St. Louis, where she grew up admiring the paintings that now flank her own. The influence of Beckmann and the German Expressionists is visible throughout. The feminist painter died in 2023 at the age of 87, before she could see this two-venue hometown survey, folded into the city's Counterpublic Triennial, which continues at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM).

Part of the lag in her recognition, the reviewer argues, stems from how far ahead of its time her work was. In the 1950s, while an art student, McNeely was diagnosed with cancer. When feminist art and discourse soon centered on empowerment, independence and strength, her experience did not fit neatly in. Instead, she dared to paint a more complicated truth: that women's bodies are vulnerable like everyone else's.

Seen up close, the radiant mother holds her baby with no muscle relaxed—jaw clenched, fingers stretched, toes tucked under. "Who cares for the caregiver? she seems to ask. It seems revealing that 'caregiver' and 'caretaker' mean the same thing."

Time and again, McNeely painted women balancing precariously—often spindly and bald, rarely relaxed, instead vivacious and embattled. One exception at SLAM shows a pair of friends reclining at last with two canine companions, one blissfully enjoying a belly scratch.

McNeely commanded anatomy yet showed little interest in naturalism. In Moving My Chair (2019), the figure's legs are nearly twice the length of her torso, toes flagrantly flexed, her hyperextended legs emphasizing her backward thrust as she grabs the furniture. McNeely made the painting after an accident left her a wheelchair user. It portrays an act once carried out unthinkingly—swapping seats—that now requires consideration, strain, and strength.

Cancer and disability were not the only experiences to leave her body undone. McNeely is best known for Is It Real? Yes It Is! (1969), which portrays her dangerous, illegal, and life-saving abortion. The scene is gruesome but not graphic, rendered in swirling jewel tones with glittering gusto, evoking less what it looked like than what it must have felt like. The reviewer notes that even now, with women's lives and autonomy on the line, one rarely finds space for both truths: that abortion can be a loss and a gain.

That magnum opus belongs to the Whitney and is not on view in St. Louis. In fact, all but three of the dozen or so works in the survey are on loan from her gallery's inventory, unsold. The knockout exception is Triskaidekaptych (1986), on view at CAM but otherwise held in an unnamed private collection.

Across its 13 panels, as in three ceramic vessels at SLAM, McNeely prompts a left-to-right narrative reading—only to frustrate it. Her scenes of bodily pleasure and pain loop and fold; images of ecstasy and agony never march toward resolution. Figures in fuchsia and goldenrod appear to fly, or float, or fall. One balances only on her big toe and pronounced cheekbone, either weightlessly breakdancing or having her face smashed into the asphalt. Lines and hooks surround them—scaffolding or strings, supports or restraints? A hook in one panel evokes Chaïm Soutine, who painted slaughterhouses while keeping kosher; McNeely's riff shows a flexed toe hoisted from the ceiling, the rest of the figure an illegible mass of guts and bones. The reviewer places her alongside Soutine, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Rosa Bonheur—artists on society's margins empathizing with humanity's systematic violence toward other animals.

McNeely painted Triskaidekaptych just after a 1982 spinal injury left her in a wheelchair, when doctors warned that making large paintings would be a challenge. That hardly deterred her. With an unlucky 13 panels, she showed how misfortune might be turned into something beautiful—"an art of transmutation" that never shies from showing the pain it's made from, at once hopeful and unflinching. A fuller retrospective, one that includes her greatest hits, remains something museums will have to deliver.