Neel Bio Is SMP Auction Win

The first full-length biography of the controversial and often tragic American artist Alice Neel was won at auction against three other bidders by St. Martin's editor Alicia Brooks. She paid six figures for world rights to the book--by Basquiat author Phoebe Hoban--to agent Molly Friedrich at the Aaron Priest agency, and is looking about four years ahead to publication of an illustrated volume. Neel, who died in 1984 at the same age as the century, was an early feminist, a single mother and a political activist who did often devastating portraits of her contemporaries, as well as lacerating self-portraits. She suffered the loss of two children and a nervous breakdown, but never ceased her passionate political and social activism. (A show of her drawings opens at the Robert Miller gallery in New York City later this month.) Hoban, the daughter of novelist Russell Hoban, is a magazine feature writer and a New York Times columnist.