Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty by Phoebe Hoban

Alice Neel:  The Art of Not Sitting Pretty by Phoebe Hoban is a 500-page hardcover published in 2010 by St. Martin's Press.  Despite it being an ex-library book, the book is in pristine condition, as though never read.  Little pen mark to the fore edges.  Book Summary Alice Neel like to say that she was the century in the many way she was. She was born into a proper Victorian family, came of age during suffrage. The quintessential Bohemian, she spent more than half a century, from her early days as a WPA artist, through her Whitney retrospective in 1974, until her death 10 years later, painting, often in near-obscurity, an extraordinarily diverse population from young black sisters in Harlem to the elderly Jewish twin artists, Raphael and Moses Soyer, to Linus Pauling, creating an indelible portrait of 20th century America. Neel's hundreds of portraits portray a universe of powerful personalities and document age. Neel painted through the depression, McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Movement, the sexual revolution of the 60s, feminism, and the feverish eighties.  Democratic in her subjects, she portrayed her lovers, her children, her Spanish Harlem neighbors, pregnant nudes, crazy people, and famous art world figures, all in a searing, psychological style uniquely her own. From village legend Joe Gould with multiple penises to Frank O'Hara as a young poet, from pornstar Annie Sprinkle to her own anxious, nude pregnant daughter-in-law, Neel's portraits are as arresting executed as they are relentlessly honest. In this first full-length biography of Neil, best-selling author Phoebe Hoban recounts the remarkable story of Neil's life and career.  Neel managed to transcend her own tragic circumstances, surviving the death of her infant daughter Santillana, her first child by the renowned Cuban painter Carlos Enriquez; the breakup of her marriage and nervous breakdown resulting in several suicide attempts for which she was institutionalized; and the terrible separation from her second child, Isabetta. ISBN:  978-0-312-60748-7