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Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty
Alice Neel liked to say that she was the century and in many ways she was. She was born into a proper Victorian family, and came of age during suffrage. The quintessential Bohemian, she spent more than half a century, from her early days as a WPA artist living in the heart of the Village, through her Whitney retrospective in 1974, until her death ten 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 Meyer Schapiro and Linus Pauling, to the American Communist Party chairman Gus Hall—creating an indelible portrait of 20th century America.
Neel's hundreds of portraits portray a universe of powerful personalities and document an age. Neel painted through the Depression, McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Movement, the sexual revolution of the 60's, feminism, and the feverish eighties. Fiercely democratic in her subjects, she portrayed her lovers, her children, her neighbors in Spanish Harlem, pregnant nudes, crazy people, and famous figures in the art world, all in a searing, psychological style uniquely her own. From Village legend Joe Gould with multiple penises to Frank O'Hara as a lyrical young poet, from porn star Annie Sprinkle gussied up in leather, to her own anxious, nude pregnant daughter-in-law, Neel's portraits are as arrestingly executed as they are relentlessly honest.
In this first full-length biography of Neel, best-selling author Phoebe Hoban recounts the remarkable story of Neel's life and career, as full of Sturm and Drang as the century she powerfully captured in paint. Neel managed to transcend her often tragic circumstances, surviving the death from diphtheria of her infant daughter Santillana, her first child by the renowned Cuban painter Carlos Enriquez, with whom she lived in Havana for a year before returning to America; the break-up of her marriage; a nervous breakdown at thirty resulting in several suicide attempts for which she was institutionalized; and the terrible separation from her second child, Isabetta, whom Carlos took back to Havana.
In every aspect of her life, Neel dictated her own terms—from defiantly painting figurative pieces at the height of Abstract Expressionism, convincing her subjects to disrobe (which many of them did, including, surprisingly, Andy Warhol) to becoming a single mother to the two sons she bore to dramatically different partners. No wonder she became the de facto artist of the Feminist movement. (When Time magazine put Kate Millet on its cover in 1970, she was asked to paint the portrait.) Very much in touch with her time, Neel was also always ahead of it. Although she herself would probably have rejected such label, she was America's first feminist, multicultural artist, a populist painter for the ages.
Phoebe Hoban's Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty tells the unforgettable story of a woman who forged a permanent place in the pantheon by courageously flaunting convention, both in her life and her work.
Neel's hundreds of portraits portray a universe of powerful personalities and document an age. Neel painted through the Depression, McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Movement, the sexual revolution of the 60's, feminism, and the feverish eighties. Fiercely democratic in her subjects, she portrayed her lovers, her children, her neighbors in Spanish Harlem, pregnant nudes, crazy people, and famous figures in the art world, all in a searing, psychological style uniquely her own. From Village legend Joe Gould with multiple penises to Frank O'Hara as a lyrical young poet, from porn star Annie Sprinkle gussied up in leather, to her own anxious, nude pregnant daughter-in-law, Neel's portraits are as arrestingly executed as they are relentlessly honest.
In this first full-length biography of Neel, best-selling author Phoebe Hoban recounts the remarkable story of Neel's life and career, as full of Sturm and Drang as the century she powerfully captured in paint. Neel managed to transcend her often tragic circumstances, surviving the death from diphtheria of her infant daughter Santillana, her first child by the renowned Cuban painter Carlos Enriquez, with whom she lived in Havana for a year before returning to America; the break-up of her marriage; a nervous breakdown at thirty resulting in several suicide attempts for which she was institutionalized; and the terrible separation from her second child, Isabetta, whom Carlos took back to Havana.
In every aspect of her life, Neel dictated her own terms—from defiantly painting figurative pieces at the height of Abstract Expressionism, convincing her subjects to disrobe (which many of them did, including, surprisingly, Andy Warhol) to becoming a single mother to the two sons she bore to dramatically different partners. No wonder she became the de facto artist of the Feminist movement. (When Time magazine put Kate Millet on its cover in 1970, she was asked to paint the portrait.) Very much in touch with her time, Neel was also always ahead of it. Although she herself would probably have rejected such label, she was America's first feminist, multicultural artist, a populist painter for the ages.
Phoebe Hoban's Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty tells the unforgettable story of a woman who forged a permanent place in the pantheon by courageously flaunting convention, both in her life and her work.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published December 7, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
May 11, 2021
This read less like a book than as a 432 page list of sentences, many of which were repeated with minimal variation. This became apparent almost immediately and only got worse and worse. The author seems to have lacked an editor, or had exhausted one to the point of throwing up their hands, and offered no compelling critical voice or sense of narrative whatsoever. An extremely frustrating slog... and the irony! of having a racantour and bohemian firecracker like Alice Neel paired with such a tedious and overwhelmed accummulator of dates and generic ephemera.
However, let's find the positives. Amid all the drekk and plodding, was genuine information that one could glean... especially if, like me, one's knowledge of Neels's biography was so thin. There are anecdotes and first-hand accounts of life-events that do begin to flesh her out and, in spite of the author, allow for some speculative insight on the part of the reader. There are high points. The quoted passages from the diaries of Phillip Bonosky were a peak and a peek into what the book might have been... (and could be a wonderful source of thoughtful information if they are available in full.)
However, let's find the positives. Amid all the drekk and plodding, was genuine information that one could glean... especially if, like me, one's knowledge of Neels's biography was so thin. There are anecdotes and first-hand accounts of life-events that do begin to flesh her out and, in spite of the author, allow for some speculative insight on the part of the reader. There are high points. The quoted passages from the diaries of Phillip Bonosky were a peak and a peek into what the book might have been... (and could be a wonderful source of thoughtful information if they are available in full.)
July 9, 2013
Alice Neel was a complex person and an important American painter. I learned alot about her from his book, but there were too many lists of works in various exhibits and reviews....those details detracted from the flow of the book and could have easily been included in notes or an appendix. This did not compare to he quality of writing in recent biographies of Jackson Pollack, Willem deKooning an Lee Krasner....to bad, because her life was equally remarkable.
September 25, 2022
One of the topics that comes up for much more discussion in today's classrooms--certainly my art history classroom--is whether the nature of a person's character and the acts they commit reflect on the quality of the art they make. Picasso is an obvious case. Do we just admire his art because a lot of white male critics, who don't give a fig for the lives or safety of women and the social and economic entrapment they endure, tell us to? Or what do we do when we love a particular musician/composer or visual artist or poet/novelist and discover what total s***s they were in fact?
I already knew that Alice Neel was a tough old bird. Phoebe Hoban's very thorough biography of her, "Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty," leaves me grateful that I never actually encountered her in person, although late in her life there might well have been opportunities to do so. I have always loved her later work, from the 1960s on, and had mixed feelings about the early work, especially the paintings of the 1930s and early 1940s. But then expressionism, surrealism and deliberately naive styles are all things I prefer in small doses.
As for the facts of her life? There is so much to loathe. Neel abandoned her daughter Isabetta when her husband, Carlos, took the child back to Cuba when she was about 18 months old. For that matter, Carlos abandoned her too, leaving Isabetta to be raised by a pair of aunts. The three or four encounters between Neel and Isabetta after that run the gamut from painful to appalling. Neel may have condoned sexual abuse of her daughter; certainly Isabetta lived a complicated and often unhappy life, eventually dying a suicide. Neel's older son, Richard (born Neel), whose father was a neer-do-well named Jose, was neglected to the point of starvation that caused blindness by Neel and her then lover Sam Brody; Brody also inflected terrible emotional and physical abuse on the child, abuse Neel made no real attempt to stop. Neel slept with whomever she pleased. She shoplifted most of her life, simply because she enjoyed it, despite her embrace of Communism and defense of the poor and oppressed. Apparently stealing from local mom and pop stores did not constitute an assault on the poor and oppressed in Neel's mind. Neel also loved frankly obscene and offensive language, not because it was expressive of anything but because it WAS offensive. " She loved the word penis and talking about penises. She liked the expression "muff-diving," a vulgarism for cunnilingus, and used it often. Late in life she was a celebrity and her circle kept and eye on her and were available to step in if her language got too far over the line.
In many ways, this biography has much in common with the 2-volume biography of Lucian Freud by Michael Feaver I have already reviewed. I finished those books feeling if maybe "too much information" wasn't getting between me and an appreciation for Freud's painting.
And on a personal note, it bothers me that she felt that giving a slide talk at a gallery, museum or academic setting, meant that she'd do a show-and-tell of every painting she had ever made. That was frequently over 200 slides. When she was on a program with other artists, they would struggle to make her go last so at least they would have a few minutes while there was still any audience. Hoban seems to think that the extraordinary "popularity" of these talks and the wild old woman who gave them show that two-plus hours of presentation can be a good thing. As a former art museum educator and person who regularly organized slide lectures and other programs, I know darned well that people, however riveting the subject, get restless around 45 minutes and will get up and leave at an hour.
As far as the book itself, published by David Zwirner Books (2010, paperback published 2021), it's adequate but not much. At least that is the case with the paperback; I have not seen the cloth edition. It has a solid collection of color plates and black-and-white photographs in the middle but as is so often the case, the images illustrated are not identified when discussed in the text. There are no plate numbers, I am sure because it is a cost-savings to not hire someone to insert plate and illustration numbers in the text. On the other hand, it impedes the reader because the analyses of many paintings are extensive and make more sense if one can easily refer to the image. (As usual, I keep a cell phone handy to look up the artworks as there are many, many paintings discussed but not illustrated.)On page 436, the last page of the acknowledgments, the final sentence reads, "More images of Alice Neel's work can be found at 222.alice3neel.com and davidzwirner.com." Now why that useful reference could not have been placed more prominently, I have no idea. So while I give the writer 4 stars for content, I give David Zwirner Books 2 stars for production and design.
This biography fits on the same shelf as "Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art" by Mary Gabriel. Neel was about a generation older than they and felt the same disapprobation from the patriarchy of the contemporary art world. Neel suffered even more as she stayed resolutely figurative in her style, eschewing the abstraction and nonobjectivity that shaped those women's art and the art world in general from the late 1940s into the 1960s. Because she painted "pictures of people," because of her adherence to the Communist party, her art was dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned, irrelevant, boring.
Well boring it certainly isn't.
The book is rich with material about Neel's friends and frenemies, lovers, children and others. I was especially appreciative of the extended attention paid to the life and work of her husband Carlos Enriques and the tragic life of their daughter Isabetta. While it occasionally felt redundant, I also appreciated the reminders throughout the book of earlier facts and events, whose context might have slipped from mind.
There's a lot of good stuff out there now about Alice Neel. Zwirner also manages the Neel estate, so exhibitions and a high public and commercial profile for this artist is ensured, at least for another few decades. But this is probably the one book to read, if for no other reason than it provides considerable background about the arts during the Depression, Social Realism as a style, and other art historical tidbits of the 20th century.
I already knew that Alice Neel was a tough old bird. Phoebe Hoban's very thorough biography of her, "Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty," leaves me grateful that I never actually encountered her in person, although late in her life there might well have been opportunities to do so. I have always loved her later work, from the 1960s on, and had mixed feelings about the early work, especially the paintings of the 1930s and early 1940s. But then expressionism, surrealism and deliberately naive styles are all things I prefer in small doses.
As for the facts of her life? There is so much to loathe. Neel abandoned her daughter Isabetta when her husband, Carlos, took the child back to Cuba when she was about 18 months old. For that matter, Carlos abandoned her too, leaving Isabetta to be raised by a pair of aunts. The three or four encounters between Neel and Isabetta after that run the gamut from painful to appalling. Neel may have condoned sexual abuse of her daughter; certainly Isabetta lived a complicated and often unhappy life, eventually dying a suicide. Neel's older son, Richard (born Neel), whose father was a neer-do-well named Jose, was neglected to the point of starvation that caused blindness by Neel and her then lover Sam Brody; Brody also inflected terrible emotional and physical abuse on the child, abuse Neel made no real attempt to stop. Neel slept with whomever she pleased. She shoplifted most of her life, simply because she enjoyed it, despite her embrace of Communism and defense of the poor and oppressed. Apparently stealing from local mom and pop stores did not constitute an assault on the poor and oppressed in Neel's mind. Neel also loved frankly obscene and offensive language, not because it was expressive of anything but because it WAS offensive. " She loved the word penis and talking about penises. She liked the expression "muff-diving," a vulgarism for cunnilingus, and used it often. Late in life she was a celebrity and her circle kept and eye on her and were available to step in if her language got too far over the line.
In many ways, this biography has much in common with the 2-volume biography of Lucian Freud by Michael Feaver I have already reviewed. I finished those books feeling if maybe "too much information" wasn't getting between me and an appreciation for Freud's painting.
And on a personal note, it bothers me that she felt that giving a slide talk at a gallery, museum or academic setting, meant that she'd do a show-and-tell of every painting she had ever made. That was frequently over 200 slides. When she was on a program with other artists, they would struggle to make her go last so at least they would have a few minutes while there was still any audience. Hoban seems to think that the extraordinary "popularity" of these talks and the wild old woman who gave them show that two-plus hours of presentation can be a good thing. As a former art museum educator and person who regularly organized slide lectures and other programs, I know darned well that people, however riveting the subject, get restless around 45 minutes and will get up and leave at an hour.
As far as the book itself, published by David Zwirner Books (2010, paperback published 2021), it's adequate but not much. At least that is the case with the paperback; I have not seen the cloth edition. It has a solid collection of color plates and black-and-white photographs in the middle but as is so often the case, the images illustrated are not identified when discussed in the text. There are no plate numbers, I am sure because it is a cost-savings to not hire someone to insert plate and illustration numbers in the text. On the other hand, it impedes the reader because the analyses of many paintings are extensive and make more sense if one can easily refer to the image. (As usual, I keep a cell phone handy to look up the artworks as there are many, many paintings discussed but not illustrated.)On page 436, the last page of the acknowledgments, the final sentence reads, "More images of Alice Neel's work can be found at 222.alice3neel.com and davidzwirner.com." Now why that useful reference could not have been placed more prominently, I have no idea. So while I give the writer 4 stars for content, I give David Zwirner Books 2 stars for production and design.
This biography fits on the same shelf as "Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art" by Mary Gabriel. Neel was about a generation older than they and felt the same disapprobation from the patriarchy of the contemporary art world. Neel suffered even more as she stayed resolutely figurative in her style, eschewing the abstraction and nonobjectivity that shaped those women's art and the art world in general from the late 1940s into the 1960s. Because she painted "pictures of people," because of her adherence to the Communist party, her art was dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned, irrelevant, boring.
Well boring it certainly isn't.
The book is rich with material about Neel's friends and frenemies, lovers, children and others. I was especially appreciative of the extended attention paid to the life and work of her husband Carlos Enriques and the tragic life of their daughter Isabetta. While it occasionally felt redundant, I also appreciated the reminders throughout the book of earlier facts and events, whose context might have slipped from mind.
There's a lot of good stuff out there now about Alice Neel. Zwirner also manages the Neel estate, so exhibitions and a high public and commercial profile for this artist is ensured, at least for another few decades. But this is probably the one book to read, if for no other reason than it provides considerable background about the arts during the Depression, Social Realism as a style, and other art historical tidbits of the 20th century.
December 24, 2025
Dnf at pg 160. Way more detail than i was interested in and the writers interjection of her opinions was annoying
December 12, 2010
Alice Neel enjoyed the greatest second act in the history of American art. Her paintings of New York bohemian life earned high praise, especially from leftist critics, during the Great Depression, but she fell into near-total obscurity with the rise of Abstract Expressionism after World War II. Undaunted, she persevered as a painter of the human form, cultivating an idiosyncratic style that combined bright colors with springy, caricature-like drawing in psychologically-rich oil portraits of art-world movers and shakers like Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson, and Frank O’Hara during the 1960s and ‘70s. A minor celebrity by the time of her death in 1984, Neel was rightly hailed as a feminist icon, a tough survivor who charted her own path to success in the male-dominated art world, never bowing to trends or fashion.
Art journalist Phoebe Hoban, author of “Basquiat” (1998), provides a methodically documented account of Neel’s life and career in the first full-length biography of the artist. Hoban clearly admires Neel and sympathizes with the struggles that carried this young woman from a Victorian upbringing in the lower-middle-class environs of Philadelphia to a complicated existence as a working artist and single mother in New York. Yet Neel emerges from these pages as a difficult, sometimes maddening personality, whose great talent both thrived upon and at times was thwarted by a taste for conflict and drama...
The rest of my review is available free online at the Boston Globe's website:
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articl...
Art journalist Phoebe Hoban, author of “Basquiat” (1998), provides a methodically documented account of Neel’s life and career in the first full-length biography of the artist. Hoban clearly admires Neel and sympathizes with the struggles that carried this young woman from a Victorian upbringing in the lower-middle-class environs of Philadelphia to a complicated existence as a working artist and single mother in New York. Yet Neel emerges from these pages as a difficult, sometimes maddening personality, whose great talent both thrived upon and at times was thwarted by a taste for conflict and drama...
The rest of my review is available free online at the Boston Globe's website:
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articl...
September 9, 2012
Good beginning and middle, but less interesting at the end, when it more or less was a list of all her gallery shows.
June 20, 2011
The artist is interesting but the book itself was not well written. It seemed disorganized and repetitive.
February 2, 2013
Old story...great painter...despicable person.
April 9, 2024
"The road that I pursued, and that road that I think keeps you an artist, is that no matter what happens to you, you still keep on painting."
It would be impossible to summarize either the life of Alice Neel, or this biography, in a short review. Her life is a series of questions, and the only real answers she ever provided to its complexities and contradictions was her extensive and life-long body of work. She always painted no matter how tumultuous both her life and the world.
I admire the work without necessarily admiring the details of the life that produced it. Could that have been separated? That's a question that haunts both the life and work of many creative people, a riddle that can never be solved. Do you reject the work because of the life? Aren't we all flawed?
Neel's life is in many ways a reflection of the twentieth century. As a young woman, she was expected to conform to a standard role--as dutiful daughter, wife, mother--something she instinctively rebelled against. Her survival during the years of the Depression depended on the salary she earned from the WPA--as did that of so many other creative people. She married a Cuban, and lived among poor Latino immigrants in New York for much of her life, never losing her allegiance to Marxism and its political and financial goals of equality for all humans. Her art was out of style for much of her middle years, overshadowed by abstraction, particularly abstract expressionism, a reflection of the twentieth century need, above all, for novelty, for a "truth" in art that somehow excluded any other point of view. Her paintings only returned to favor when portraiture was re-discovered by the Gatekeepers of Good Art, whose ideas change as frequently as the trends of fashion.
A natural storyteller, the late 20th century, with its explosion of communications technology and its embrace of the Outsider, of Feminism, and of Minority Rights, gave Neel's art, and her life narrative, a platform which she enjoyed to the fullest and took advantage of with a vengeance.
She could be prickly, and self-involved. She attempted suicide more than once and was often depressed. Though she never divorced her husband, she had many, often abusive, lovers and live-in partners, some concurrently. She lost her first child to death and poverty, the second to a passive abandonment; she had several abortions and at least one stillbirth. No one would ever have accused her of being a good mother. And yet she raised two successful sons despite the fact that she was often neglectful of them.
There was so much chaos in her life that it's hard to follow the narrative of it. I'm exhausted just thinking of it again.
Through it all, she kept painting.
What is the price the artist must pay for their art? "I do not know if the truth that I have told will benefit the world in any way. I managed to do it at great cost to myself and perhaps to others." Neel said near the end of her life.
One critic called her "a ruthlessly unsentimental chronicler of humanity." We need that mirror more than ever right now. Just give us some truth, as John Lennon so aptly sang. Please.
It would be impossible to summarize either the life of Alice Neel, or this biography, in a short review. Her life is a series of questions, and the only real answers she ever provided to its complexities and contradictions was her extensive and life-long body of work. She always painted no matter how tumultuous both her life and the world.
I admire the work without necessarily admiring the details of the life that produced it. Could that have been separated? That's a question that haunts both the life and work of many creative people, a riddle that can never be solved. Do you reject the work because of the life? Aren't we all flawed?
Neel's life is in many ways a reflection of the twentieth century. As a young woman, she was expected to conform to a standard role--as dutiful daughter, wife, mother--something she instinctively rebelled against. Her survival during the years of the Depression depended on the salary she earned from the WPA--as did that of so many other creative people. She married a Cuban, and lived among poor Latino immigrants in New York for much of her life, never losing her allegiance to Marxism and its political and financial goals of equality for all humans. Her art was out of style for much of her middle years, overshadowed by abstraction, particularly abstract expressionism, a reflection of the twentieth century need, above all, for novelty, for a "truth" in art that somehow excluded any other point of view. Her paintings only returned to favor when portraiture was re-discovered by the Gatekeepers of Good Art, whose ideas change as frequently as the trends of fashion.
A natural storyteller, the late 20th century, with its explosion of communications technology and its embrace of the Outsider, of Feminism, and of Minority Rights, gave Neel's art, and her life narrative, a platform which she enjoyed to the fullest and took advantage of with a vengeance.
She could be prickly, and self-involved. She attempted suicide more than once and was often depressed. Though she never divorced her husband, she had many, often abusive, lovers and live-in partners, some concurrently. She lost her first child to death and poverty, the second to a passive abandonment; she had several abortions and at least one stillbirth. No one would ever have accused her of being a good mother. And yet she raised two successful sons despite the fact that she was often neglectful of them.
There was so much chaos in her life that it's hard to follow the narrative of it. I'm exhausted just thinking of it again.
Through it all, she kept painting.
What is the price the artist must pay for their art? "I do not know if the truth that I have told will benefit the world in any way. I managed to do it at great cost to myself and perhaps to others." Neel said near the end of her life.
One critic called her "a ruthlessly unsentimental chronicler of humanity." We need that mirror more than ever right now. Just give us some truth, as John Lennon so aptly sang. Please.
July 7, 2021
A decent biography of the phenomenal American portraitist, Alice Neel, whose life was, seemingly, a train wreck for quite a few decades. A feminist before “feminist” was an excepted term. A painter who portrayed the poor and disenfranchised immigrants in Spanish Harlem long before “diversity" was a buzzword granting entry to artistic and intellectual circles. Alice Neel’s life story can easily substitute for a more panoramic account of the NYC Bohemian lifestyle in the East Village. Villains include an opium-addicted jealous boyfriend who damaged or destroyed over 60 of her paintings and, later, an abusive (sort of) live-in boyfriend. Since Neel painted so many people from her life, the biography is integral in helping place stories behind some of the portraits, though there really is no need because her paintings have an inimical spirit all their own. Nevertheless, this biography is competent accompaniment to her art books and makes leafing through them way more enjoyable.
The book is unfortunately a bit scattered and suffers from chapters that rely too heavily on diaries of those associated with Neel. It can be a confusing read in parts. The final chapter is almost completely unnecessary, in that it recounts posthumous Neel exhibits; the final 70 or so pages would have been better served in an appendix; however, this is a weakness in quite a few biographies and no reason to avoid the book.
A personal quibble: My favorite portrait, Randall in Extremis, was hardly mentioned. Not a word on the back story [sigh].
The book is unfortunately a bit scattered and suffers from chapters that rely too heavily on diaries of those associated with Neel. It can be a confusing read in parts. The final chapter is almost completely unnecessary, in that it recounts posthumous Neel exhibits; the final 70 or so pages would have been better served in an appendix; however, this is a weakness in quite a few biographies and no reason to avoid the book.
A personal quibble: My favorite portrait, Randall in Extremis, was hardly mentioned. Not a word on the back story [sigh].
February 24, 2025
I bought a book on June 10th 2022 (I kept the receipt in the book) after seeing Alice Neel' exhibition "Alice Neel: People Come First" at the de Young museum. I really loved her paintings and wanted to know more about her so I bought her autobiography. It took me more than 3 years to start reading the book. It is a very long book with over 400 pages and it took me more than 2 weeks to finish it. But I'm very happy I finally finished reading the book.
The book is very long because it references so many sources; it is almost like reading an academic research paper. Towards the end of the book I started to skip a lot of the references and the reading got faster and smoother.
The book is very comprehensive about Neel's life. She's a very complicated person. She didn't get recognized until in her sixties but she persevered.
In her own words (page 432):
I tried to paint the scene. A human comedy like Balzac - the past, present, and future interlaced with the levels of society, like Proust. It's terrible to think that life happens and just goes, disappears. I paint my time using the people as evidence. I believe in art as history. The swirl of the era is what you are in and what you paint. I love, pity, hate, and fear all at once, and try to keep a record.
Maybe this is also why I'm doing my podcast about people—even though I couldn't articulate it as well as she does about her art.
The book is very long because it references so many sources; it is almost like reading an academic research paper. Towards the end of the book I started to skip a lot of the references and the reading got faster and smoother.
The book is very comprehensive about Neel's life. She's a very complicated person. She didn't get recognized until in her sixties but she persevered.
In her own words (page 432):
I tried to paint the scene. A human comedy like Balzac - the past, present, and future interlaced with the levels of society, like Proust. It's terrible to think that life happens and just goes, disappears. I paint my time using the people as evidence. I believe in art as history. The swirl of the era is what you are in and what you paint. I love, pity, hate, and fear all at once, and try to keep a record.
Maybe this is also why I'm doing my podcast about people—even though I couldn't articulate it as well as she does about her art.
February 9, 2025
Zeer gedetailleerd en genuanceerd boek over het leven en werk van Alice Neel. Ze portretteert mensen, zowel bekende als onbekende, op een zeer eigenzinnige manier waardoor nogal wat geportretteerden het resultaat weinig flatterend vonden. Daar was het Alice Neel niet om te doen. Ze wou laten zien hoe het leven de mens tekende, niet zozeer als slachtoffer maar als een overlever. Ze hield ervan mensen, ook mannen en zwangere vrouwen, naakt af te beelden en ontdoet het naaktportret van sensualiteit of erotiek. Dit zorgde er ondermeer voor dat ze als feministe werd bestempeld.
De manier waarop ze als moeder en partner in het leven stond en dat ondergeschikt was aan het schilderen wordt heel genuanceerd besproken en zorgt voor vaak aangrijpende passages.
Alice Neel kende vooral succes op het einde van haar loopbaan. Ze werd 84 jaar. Ze beïnvloedde tal van kunstenaars...
De manier waarop ze als moeder en partner in het leven stond en dat ondergeschikt was aan het schilderen wordt heel genuanceerd besproken en zorgt voor vaak aangrijpende passages.
Alice Neel kende vooral succes op het einde van haar loopbaan. Ze werd 84 jaar. Ze beïnvloedde tal van kunstenaars...
March 29, 2021
I'm in awe of this woman's devotion to making her art and showing it until her death at age 84. Her relationships were messy, her children suffered, but she never stopped painting, and painting what she wanted to, in the style she wanted to, despite contemporary trends. "Art in many ways is similar to a religious experience. Something of which you are not completely aware speaks through you. 'Not my will but thine.'" (p. 375)
November 28, 2023
A wonderful biography of the famous artist who, although born in 1900, wasn't discovered until the 1970s. Alice Neel was a woman who didn't follow trends (artistically or socially) and lived her own life on her own terms. Painting portraits when they were passe, being a feminist before that was a thing, outspoken...this is a fascinating look at an important artist.
March 9, 2025
Interesting read but instead of continuing to talk about her life and work after she gained recognition the author essentially just lest exhibitions and copies large paragraphs of exhibitions reviews which added very little beyond being an extremely drawn out list of exhibitions so it could have been edited down by at least 150 pages.
April 25, 2023
5 stars for Alice Neel the artist, 2 stars for author Phoebe Hoban. Never has it been such a slog to get through reading about someone so interesting. Disappointed in how this was written, but glad I made it through
April 14, 2024
I enjoyed reading this biography of sorts, learnt so much about Alice Neel (whose paintings I’ve always liked), her life and inspirations, what it took for her to be the artist she was, and about art as always. Insightful!
December 13, 2025
Inspiring feminist and cultural history of one of the toughest and hard-working- and girl, Neel had to be, with everything she had to face down to be the genius certain male artists assumed they had every right to be. Great stuff!
September 30, 2021
A super biography of a very interesting and talented artist. Can’t wait to see her work in person!
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August 23, 2023It's always so puzzling to me when a biographer has such a clear personal bias against their subject but went ahead and researched and wrote a whole book anyway
November 20, 2023
Great content but needs to be cut down.
March 24, 2024
Lots of list of exhibits, and quite repetitive. The most interesting and illuminating sections were taken directly from the diaries of Phillip Bonosky. I struggled to get through this book.
April 6, 2025
Ufffff, que complicada es la gente y esta señora y au vida y todo. Mucho gris entre tabto cuadro colorido. Al final mucho texto de que decian las galleries de ella.
October 29, 2021
Phoebe Hoban’s rendering of Alice Neel as “Painter of the People” gives rich contextual meaning and fine emotional depth to Neel’s art. Alice Neel’s move to Spanish Harlem in the 1930s is a turning point for her to explore the truth about humanity. Neel said, “You know what I thought I would find there? More truth.” There was indeed more truth in Spanish Harlem. There does always seem to be more truth among the poor and working-classes. When a person has little or nothing left to lose, few lies are worth holding onto.
Neel was legendary for painting naked people. Young, old, the famous and not so famous, rich, poor, black, white, men, women, binary and other. She wanted everyone to shed their clothes. No one escaped her scrutiny or the genius stroke of her brush. Getting people to pose naked was Neel’s way of being in control, in charge of her art, stripping away the vain and illusory to reveal what was true about her subjects. And the truth is never just pretty.
Neel was legendary for painting naked people. Young, old, the famous and not so famous, rich, poor, black, white, men, women, binary and other. She wanted everyone to shed their clothes. No one escaped her scrutiny or the genius stroke of her brush. Getting people to pose naked was Neel’s way of being in control, in charge of her art, stripping away the vain and illusory to reveal what was true about her subjects. And the truth is never just pretty.
April 8, 2011
Alice Neel is a great painter. Her portraits are original and she seems to be driven to paint no matter what the circumstances are. Her life itself is tragic. Hoban's biography is very clear in juxtaposing Alice's life with her work. I have not read any of the other literature on Alice, so I do not know if Hoban reveals anything new about Alice or if she stays true to the accepted facts. I would read this book only if you are interested in the artist.
The number of illustrations in this book is unfortunate. Hoban tells Neal's life through her work and much of it is not illustrated in the book. I would love to see more pictures.
The number of illustrations in this book is unfortunate. Hoban tells Neal's life through her work and much of it is not illustrated in the book. I would love to see more pictures.
January 1, 2024
I appreciate that this book introduced me to Alice Neel. I'm not sure about the organization of the writing, and I don't know how I feel about Alice Neel or her art, but I respect her personal integrity and commitment to being entirely herself (though, sadly, this seems to have hurt many of the people around her in life). I learned about art and social history. honestly, her passing (though not unexpected) was sad to read about - seeing that death comes for everyone - and the afterword was a nice brief return of quotes from Alice. entering her world moved me, so the book did something powerful!
June 8, 2011
Hoban's writing isn't that fluid or compelling, so this wasn't the most pleasant read. I read the book chiefly because I knew Neel had an extraordinary life for a woman artist in her day. Neel didn't find acclaim or financial stability until she was fairly old. Most interesting was how much Neel didn't care about what other people, including her own daughter, thought of her until later in life. She just lived to do her art and other matters, including family, were damned.
April 26, 2013
This biography gets bogged down by the portraits of all the people in Neel’s life and feels like it focuses too little on her art (perhaps there is not that much to say about it?). I also wanted more social history, more art history, and there is certainly some of that, but maybe because Neel was so out of the mainstream, it’s hard to integrate more of that sort of thing. The book seems too rambling and repetitive for my tastes.
Want to read
December 23, 2012So far, not impressed w/ the writing. Neel's story is a fascinating one, so it's unfortunate that the telling of it makes it seem just the opposite. I'm sticking with it for now, b/c Alice Neel is one of my very favorite painters, but I can't say I'll make it all the way through...
March 13, 2012
Hard-wired for honesty and independence, Neel seemed to paint people from the inside out, capturing their souls like no other portraitist. Her lifestyle and choices could horrify, but her curiosity about human beings redeemed her. This bio does a great job capturing this paradox.
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