From left: Elizabeth Stephens, Annie Sprinkle, Gloria Leonard, Veronica Vera, Veronica Hart, Candida Royalle.

“How many people here have I fucked?” called out an exuberant Annie Sprinkle to the crowd Tuesday night at the Museum of Sex. The group had  gathered for the reunion of “The Golden Girls of Porn,” as the panel discussion was billed. She got a few laughs, and some raised hands when she asked how many had seen her cervix in her infamous stage show.

The Q&A was led by Ms. Sprinkle’s partner, Elizabeth Stephens and also featured Veronica Hart, Gloria Leonard, Candida Royalle and Veronica Vera—each exuberant, proud and, at times, wistful as they recounted their careers in the adult business. Fittingly, they formed their support group, Club 90, named for Ms. Sprinkle’s nearby former apartment at 90 Lexington Avenue, in 1983, and have met semi-regularly ever since; all were bridesmaids at Ms. Vera’s wedding to artist Stuart Cottingham this past weekend.

Porn, it turns out, wasn’t a calling so much as “why not?” opportunity. Ms. Hart, armed with a theater degree, wanted to be an actress, and was drawn to her first set because she liked the script (she went on to have parts in Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Six Feet Under), while Ms. Vera slipped into one of Ms. Sprinkle’s scenes to help out a male actor experiencing, ahem, difficulties.

The adult industry, to these ladies, was about making a statement rather than a quick buck. Ms. Leonard, the only one to share her age (71), started her porn career in her mid-thirties as a political act supporting free speech; she sounded quite pleased that during her tenure as editor of High Society, they were sued by the likes of Barbra Streisand and Ann-Margret, and won. Similarly, Ms. Vera smiled wickedly when highlighting a bondage photo of her that she included in her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1984.

The only points of contention struck were over the environment and condom use in porn. Ms. Sprinkle, who hosted a talk with Ms. Stephens at the Museum of Sex last night called “Assuming the Ecosexual Position,” expressed concern that porn is “killing the mountains” by using up so much bandwidth.California’s mandatory condom-use law, which took effect in March, was largely scorned. Ms. Hart declared, “Our numbers for HIV are lower than the general population. We have policed ourselves." When Ms. Royalle said she wanted to protect her actors and set a “positive example,” Hart shot back with, “We’re not the only business where people take risks; look at policemen or firemen.”

The overall mood was celebratory, as if their porn days were more nonstop party than work, though Ms. Royalle admitted to going into therapy to work out her early ambivalence about performing on camera and explained the group’s necessity with, “You can’t know how it feels to be scorned for something you’ve done and never be forgiven.” Her favorite memory was learning to skateboard while preparing to shoot 1979’s Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls.

Not much love was given to the modern porn industry, save for Ms. Royalle’s Femme Productions line and Ms. Hart’s ongoing work behind the camera (one of her sons, who was in attendance, works alongside her as a director of photography). From the crowd, infamous cable access host Robin Byrd lamented, “When you ask a multiple-choice question of today’s porn star, they say ‘uh-huh,’” giving the final word her best airhead inflection. “I can’t think of a single name of a girl performing in porn today who will likely be remembered in twenty years,” Ms. Leonard declared.

The fact that these women are still, if not household names, successful (though Ms. Leonard admitted she is “living close to the poverty level”) and able to pack a room largely with their peers (one male audience member remembered scenes more accurately than their performers) is testament to their longevity.

Jeff Vanzetti, webmaster of the Internet Adult Film Database, agreed that Club 90’s members helped shape porn and still have ardent fans. “Just like there’s still a market for old music, there’s still a market for old porn,” he said, citing the Blu-Ray release of The Opening of Misty Beethoven, starring Ms. Leonard. Lisa Vandever, director of the CineKink film festival, concurred. "Their work has been instrumental in creating a happy, positive voice for women around pleasure and sexuality, both in their porn of the time and their endeavors since. It felt like we were basking in their presence."

While none of the women publicly discussed any negative repercussions to taking it all off on camera, Ms. Vera told The Observer some men she dated disdained her career choices. “Porn saved me from a lot of bad relationships.”

In the catalogue of The Art of Alice Neel , currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I am described as one of the artist's "enemies." It's true that I wrote some unfavorable notices of her work, and Alice–as I shall refer to her here–took unfavorable criticism very hard. She considered it a kind of lèse majesté . Her customary response to such affronts was to attempt an amateur psychoanalysis of the perpetrator.

"Hilton, I know why you hate my paintings," she once said to me. We had run into each other in the lobby of the Whitney. "It's because you hated your mother." In fact, as I patiently explained to her, I was very fond of my mother; it was Alice's paintings that I disliked. But this was a distinction that Alice couldn't fathom. She preferred her explanation to mine, though, of course, she knew nothing about my mother–or about me either, for that matter. Nor did I hate her paintings; I just didn't think they were very good.

Many people liked Alice's style of impudent, aggressive talk, and she was used to getting away with it. They liked it for the same reason they liked her paintings. It was part of her act: playing the role of the sassy old lady to the delight of her proper bourgeois admirers. As a performance, it was certainly a huge success. It was far more entertaining than her paintings, too. The old boys at the Whitney used to lap it up, and much that we read in the catalogue of the current exhibition is a recycling of familiar stories about her verbal audacities.

The current show at the Whitney is the third that the museum has devoted to Alice's work. Even so, it has proved to be insufficient for her hard-core fans–among them Roberta Smith, who complained in The New York Times that the Whitney had done Alice wrong by failing to devote more than one floor to the current exhibition.

Well, as you might expect, one floor has proved to be more than sufficient for me. After all, the style (really an anti-style) of Alice's portraits–and it is only in her portraits that her work makes an even minimal claim on our attention–is badly handicapped by the incessant and apparently involuntary repetition of certain unlovely pictorial gimmicks. There is that bug-eyed look she gives to the faces of so many of her subjects, whether they are children or young men and women or geriatric ruins. She even waited until she was a geriatric ruin herself before attempting her first self-portrait at the age of 80–and in the nude, of course. I don't count as self-portraits the 1935 drawing of a naked Alice sitting on the toilet while her naked lover pisses into the sink, and similar mementos of la vie de bohème .

Then, too, there is the buckeye paint-handling, which has all the delicacy and charm of an apprentice mason applying mortar with a trowel. In lieu of anything resembling a pictorial structure in her portraits, moreover, Alice was hopelessly dependent upon a few illustrational formulas for modeling her subjects. To these she added color for flashy effect–the kind of effect that creates its own pictorial monotony in any sizable showing of these portraits.

Her principal talent, in my judgment, was for rendering a likeness, and people do so like a likeness. The downside of this was that she turned every likeness into a type. Ann Temkin, who organized the current show at the Whitney, gets it exactly right when she observes that Alice painted "with the eye of a caricaturist." Which is to say that she turns almost all of her subjects into something freakish, misshapen and ill-fated. There are exceptions, to be sure: The portraits of her son Hartley and other members of the family are respectful, flattering and affectionate. Certain artists and art-world figures were similarly exempted from the caricaturist's impulse to mock and defame–among them, Faith Ringgold, Marisol, Henry Geldzahler and Annie Sprinkle. But as Ms. Sprinkle, the porn star who became a performance artist, is herself a caricature, no mockery was needed. True, she comes off in Alice's portrait looking a little stunted, and the picture itself is little more than a painted cartoon, but Ms. Sprinkle was an ideal subject for Alice–a ready-made, so to speak.

Other subjects were not so lucky. "Neel zooms in on a person's physical imperfections," writes Ms. Temkin in a remarkable understatement. She might have added that at times Alice was given to exaggerating or even inventing imperfections. I wonder if I'm really alone in finding the second version of her portrait of Frank O'Hara (1960) and her later portrait of Meyer Schapiro (1983), to cite but two of many examples, really appalling.

But everyone loves Alice's paintings anyway. As Jean Cocteau once said in another context, she knew exactly how far she could go in going too far. Alice socked it to the art-world suits, and they loved her for it. Six years after her death, she is a success, suitable entertainment for the summer-tourist season at the Whitney on the first stop of a national tour.

The Art of Alice Neel remains on view at the Whitney Museum through Sept. 17, and will then travel to museums in Andover, Mass., Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Denver.