Phoebe Hoban is a New York-based journalist who has covered art and culture for a number of major publications, including The New York Times, New York magazine, The New York Observer, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and ARTnews, among others. Her biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (1998) was a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her biography of Alice Neel, Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty (2010), was named one of the Best Books of the Year by New York magazine, one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The Village Voice, and one of the Ten Best Biographies of the Year by Booklist. Her most recent biography, Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open (2014), was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Pick.

Alice Neel was born in 1900 in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, and died in 1984 in New York. With a practice spanning from the 1920s to the 1980s, Neel is widely regarded as one of the foremost American painters of the twentieth century. Based in New York, Neel selected her sitters from among her family members, friends, neighbors, and a variety of New Yorkers, and her eccentric portraits are thus a portrayal of, and dialogue with, the city in which she lived. Although she showed sporadically early in her career, from the 1960s onward her work was exhibited widely in the United States. In 1974, she had her first retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Introduction; Studio Still Life; Childhood's Canvas; Designing Women; En Plein Air; Limbo; Tropical Soul; (You Can Go) Home Again; Futility of Effort; The Bell Jar; Resurrection; Next Stop, Geenwich Village; The Easel Project; A Man's Man for All That; Moving On; Jose and Spanish Harlem; More Truth; Enter Sam; Painting in Oblivion; Domestic Dramas; Monsters and Victims; In the Middle of the Road; Romancero Guajiro; Pull My Daisy (From Flower to Power; Their Balls Are Just Higher Up; Vindication; Bowing Out; Last Look; Coda; Epilogue; Notes; Acknowledgements; Index