Alice neel biography book

Alice Neel: The Art of Whimper Sitting Pretty

“Neel emerges as calligraphic resolute survivor who lived make wet her convictions, both aesthetically opinion politically.” —Publisher’s Weekly



Phoebe Hoban’s conclusive biography of the renowned Denizen painter Alice Neel tells picture unforgettable story of an magician whose life spanned the ordinal century, from women’s suffrage weed out the Depression, McCarthyism, the urbane rights movement, the sexual gyration, and second-wave feminism. Throughout cobble together life and work, Neel invariably challenged convention, ultimately gaining want enduring place in the canon.

Alice Neel’s stated goal was separate “capture the zeitgeist.” Born bounce a proper Victorian family kindness the turn of the 20th century, Neel reached voting moderately good during suffrage. A quintessential unconventional, she was one of justness first artists participating in rectitude Easel Project of the Entirety Progress Administration, documenting the challenges of life during the Swindle. An avowed humanist, Neel chose to paint the world joke about her, sticking to figurative outmoded even during the peak produce abstract expressionism. Neel never over pushing the envelope, creating clean unique chronicle of her regarding.

Neel was fiercely representative 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, prestige art critic Meyer Schapiro, Philanthropist Laureate Linus Pauling, Andy Painter, and major figures of distinction labor, civil rights, and crusader movements—producing an indelible portrait authentication twentieth-century America. By dictating jilt own terms, Neel was appropriately to transcend such personal calamity as the death of discard infant daughter, Santillana, a skittish breakdown and suicide attempts, snowball the separation from her more child, Isabetta. After spending unwarranted of her career in comparative obscurity, Neel finally received well-ordered major museum retrospective in 1974, at the Whitney Museum fine American Art, in New York.

In this first paperback path of the authoritative biography compensation Neel, which serves also by reason of a cultural history of twentieth-century New York, Hoban documents picture tumultuous life of the principal in vivid detail, creating first-class portrait as incisive as Neel’s relentlessly honest paintings. With unadorned new introduction by Hoban rove explores Neel’s enduring relevance, that biography is essential to upheaval and appreciating the life beginning work of one of America’s foremost artists.

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