Phoebe Hoban Libri

Phoebe Hoban's biography of Alice Neel presents the compelling story of a pioneering American painter whose life encompassed the significant events of the twentieth century, including women's suffrage, the Depression, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, and feminism. Neel consistently defied conventions, aiming to "capture the zeitgeist." Born into a Victorian family, she reached voting age during suffrage and became a quintessential bohemian artist, participating in the Easel Project of the Works Progress Administration to document the hardships of the Depression. As a committed humanist, she focused on figurative work even amid the rise of abstract expressionism, creating a unique chronicle of her era. Neel's subjects were diverse, ranging from notable figures like Joe Gould and Andy Warhol to her Spanish Harlem neighbors, reflecting a broad spectrum of twentieth-century America. Despite personal tragedies, including the loss of her daughter and struggles with mental health, Neel persevered. After years of obscurity, she gained recognition with a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1974. This biography, now in paperback, not only details Neel's tumultuous life but also serves as a cultural history of twentieth-century New York, enriched by a new introduction that highlights her lasting significance.

The brief career of a man who went from a teenage graffiti writer to an international art star, dying at age 27 of a drug overdose, is profiled in this first biography of the charismatic figure. Photos.

Phoebe Hoban, author of definitive biographies of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Alice Neel, now turns her attention to Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund and one of the greatest painters England has produced. Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open is the first biography to assess Freud's work and life, showing how the two converge. In Hoban's dramatic and fast-paced narrative, we follow Freud from his birthplace in Berlin to London, where he fled with his family in the 1930s, and then to Paris, where he mixed with Picasso and Giacometti. He led a dissolute life in Soho after the war, gambling and womanizing with fierce energy. He painted his wives nude, his children nude, himself nude. He married twice, had an uncountable number of children, and kept working through it all, painting everyone from close friend and rival Francis Bacon to Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth. He sometimes spent years on a single painting, which could require hundreds of hours of sittings. However various his subjects, his intent was always the same: to find and reveal the character hidden within by means of his intense visual imagination. Along with its startling biographical revelations, the great thrill of Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open is the way Hoban deconstructs the art itself—its influences, models, and technique—to show how Freud reproduced reality on the canvas while breaking down the illusion that what we see is real.