Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty

Name: Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty
Price: 25.36 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Phoebe Hoban
ISBN: 9781644230527

Alice Neel’s stated goal was to “capture the zeitgeist.” Born into a proper Victorian family at the turn of the twentieth century, Neel reached voting age during suffrage. An avowed humanist, Neel chose to paint the world around her, sticking to figurative work even during the peak of abstract expressionism. And she was fiercely democratic in selecting her subjects, who represent an extraordinarily diverse population — from such legendary figures as Joe Gould to her Spanish Harlem neighbors in the 1940s, the art critic Meyer Schapiro, Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, Andy Warhol, and major figures of the labor, civil rights, and feminist movements — producing an indelible portrait of twentieth-century America.

By dictating her own terms, Neel was able to transcend such personal tragedy as the death of her infant daughter, Santillana, a nervous breakdown and suicide attempts, and the separation from her second child, Isabetta. After spending much of her career in relative obscurity, Neel finally received a major museum retrospective in 1974, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. In this first paperback edition of the authoritative biography of Neel, author Phoebe Hoban documents the tumultuous life of the artist in vivid detail, creating a portrait as incisive as Neel’s relentlessly honest paintings.