Phoebe Hoban Reads from her Alice Neel Biography

With the cinematic arc of painter Alice Neel's life -- early tragedy, middle obscurity, late renown -- it's difficult to see why there hadn't been a full-scale biography until last month when Phoebe Hoban published Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty. Alice and her husband, Carlos Enriquez, a Cuban painter, were so broke in their Upper West Side apartment that they lacked enough heat to keep their infant daughter healthy. When she got sick, they had no money for a doctor and didn't seek help. The baby developed diptheria and died. After some time, they had another child, whom Carlos took alone to Cuba to meet her grandparents, and neither came back. He moved to Paris; their child was raised in Havana. Alice had a breakdown and tried to kill herself, ending in an expensive sanitorium for a year. She was released in 1931; her ascent in the art world didn't happen until the late 1960s. She painted Kate Millet's portrait for the cover of Time in 1970 and had her first retrospective at the Whitney in 1974. She died ten years later with her fame finally in full flower.

Last night Hoban read at 192 Books and appeared doubtful when I mentioned that Neel is in the Hide/Seek show in DC. [Her Frank O'Hara is catalog plate 45.] I asked if Alice had ever had a same sex relationship and Hoban said, "She would have done anything, but no. There have been rumors but I don't think she did."

Top: Neel's portrait of artist-boyfriends Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian Buczak. Right: self-portrait at 80.

Comments

[phoebe hoban]

Thanks for coming to the reading. I wasn't doubtful that Neel is in the Hide/Seek show, I was just hearing it for the first time. I don't think her son and daughter-in-law, at the reading, were aware of it either.

In fact, I said when you mentioned it, I replied that Neel had created her own genre as one of the first and most sensitive chroniclers of gay relationships--something that I discuss in my book, where I say, among other things, "Neel's empathetic depiction of gay and transgender couples arguably stands alone in art history."