Alice Neel : The Art of Not Sitting Pretty

In her recent book, Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty (2010, St. Martin’s Press), author Phoebe Hoban expertly describes the pioneering life of painter Alice Neel. Hoban completed a chapter as a scholar-in-residence at The Watermill Center in May 2009. Born into a proper Victorian family near Philadelphia at the turn of the century, Neel came of age during suffrage and had an extremely strong social and political conscience. During the early part of her career she lived in near poverty in Greenwich Village working as a WPA artist, but her uniquely styled portraits, landscapes and still-lifes kept her outside the prevalent avant-garde scene. Despite personal hardships including the death of her first child, a suicide attempt, and the destruction of more than 350 of her works she remained dedicated to her bohemian lifestyle and her painting. By the 1960s she finally emerged out of obscurity to become a prominent member of New York’s art world painting artists (including Andy Warhol), curators, and gallery owners, and honored with a Whitney retrospective in 1974.

Phoebe Hoban is a New York-based journalist who has covered culture and the arts for a variety of publications, includingThe New York Times, New York Magazine, The New York Observer, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar and GQ.

At New York Magazine she specialized in investigative articles on cultural controversies, including J.D. Salinger’s lawsuit against his then-biographer, Ian Hamilton; Kathleen Battle’s firing from the Metropolitan Opera; the publishing snafu over Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho,: and Woody Allen’s notoroious break-up with Mia Farrow. She also did an in-depth profile of Larry Gagosian. Her most recent piece for New York was on Laurie Simmons “Love Doll” photographs.

Her biography, “Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art,” published by Viking in 1998, was a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Her most recent book, “Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty,” published this past December, was named one of the ten best books of the year by the Village Voice and Oprah’s O magazine listed it as one of the books to look for in 2011. In the New York Times, Ken Johnson wrote that it “should be the biography of the year.” It was also a New York Times Sunday Book Review Editors’ Choice.