Painting the Town
LeRoy Neiman, Perhaps the Best Known, Highest Paid
and Most Belittled Artist of Our Time, Confidently Awaits History's
Judgment
by Nancy Wolfson
He gets off the elevator on the wrong floor. Wearing paint-splattered
orange cotton shorts, a spotless white shirt--collar up and top three
buttons open--slouchy gray gym socks and leather paint-dabbed running
shoes, LeRoy Neiman just shrugs and begins trudging up the stairs in
the Hotel des Artistes, his home base for some 33 years. Made up of
double-height rooms, this exclusive New York City landmark was
originally intended for painters. Norman Rockwell once lived here, yet
celebrities such as Rudolph Valentino, Noel Coward and ex-mayor John
Lindsay have also called it home. Neiman's painting studio, offices,
and home are on one floor, his archives on another, and his
pied-à-terre at the top. He takes the stairs to the penthouse.
On the climb, holding an unlit maduro, Neiman recalls a meaningful
cigar moment of more than 20 years ago: "I was at an opening of
Salvador Dalí's holograms in New York. A photographer was about
to shoot a picture of me with Dalí when Victor Hammer, my
dealer, came running over, urging me to get rid of the
cigar. Dalí intervened, 'Keep that cigar, LeRoy. It's a good
prop.'" Neiman kept the cigar.
The artist fumbles with his keys before unlocking the door. "You are
about to see the real me. By taking you up here, I am baring my true
self to you," he half-jokes, with his characteristic nonchalance. He
opens the door to reveal a clean, garret-like space, consisting of two
small light-filled rooms connected by an open doorway. In one room
there is a single bed, neatly covered with a forest green printed
bedspread. Centered above it hangs a Neiman oil painting titled "Hunt
Rendezvous." The adjacent sitting room is dominated by a table with a
glass top on a curvy wrought-iron base. Beyond the sitting room is a
solarium that leads to a large terrace overlooking Central Park. The
terrace is outfitted with some Adirondack chairs and an unpretentious
custom-made drawing table.
The pristine penthouse seems a striking contrast to the 68-year-old
Neiman's public image of the flamboyant man-about-town, with the
signature handlebar moustache and a reputed affinity for wine, women
and the good life. His private space looks more like a page from
Martha Stewart Living than the sort of plush interior Neiman
would paint. "I come up here to read and draw," the artist says in his
soft, even-toned tenor.
You never catch his subjects reading or drawing. They are more apt to
dine, dance, gamble, drink, box, dunk, swing, sail, cycle or
drive. Powerfully, they compete and celebrate, play and perform. They
are active, not passive. A roster of Neiman's subjects reads like a
Who's Who of athletes, jet-setters and celebrities: Michael Jordan,
Jack Nicklaus, Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, Tommy Tune, New York
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Bobby Kennedy, Prince Rainier and Princess
Grace of Monaco, restaurateur/chef Wolfgang Puck, Mike Tyson and
O.J. Simpson (in their pretrial days)--even Triple Crown winner
Secretariat. Odds are, the list of luminaries that Neiman
hasn't painted would be shorter than a lineup of those he has.
Among the neglected was Richard Nixon. "I was in Moscow at the
Goodwill Games in 1986," Neiman recalls, "and a Russian official came
running over to me, insisting there was someone I had to meet. It was
Nixon, who gripped me in an extended handshake and immediately asked
why I'd never painted him. I admitted I'd never put him on a canvas,
but confessed to having sketched him once. 'You were walking across
the White House lawn with Henry Kissinger, and you both had your hands
in your pockets. I drew it because I thought it was taboo for top guys
to walk with their hands concealed.' 'You really got me that time,'
the ex-president roared. Then he walked over to the piano and played
'God Bless America!'" Neiman laughs. "He was really a character."
Catching people with their pants down, or their hands in their
pockets, as the case may be, is out of character for Neiman. Rather,
he does unto others as he would have them do unto him. He glorifies
them. Rhoda Altman, who has been selling Neiman's work for eight years
at New York's Hammer Graphics Gallery (which has represented him for
35 years) says, "He is our modern-day Impressionist. The main
difference between LeRoy Neiman and the nineteenth century
Impressionists is they would paint women at their toilette with no
makeup. Neiman wants to show everyone with their false eyelashes on at
all times. He wants them to look their best."
Neiman even made Al Capone look good, in a posthumous 1965
portrait. "I think the exterior person is very important. I think the
way things look is the way they are," Neiman says. "Even if a person
is masquerading, then that's what he is. Sort of on the premise [that]
a lie, once believed, becomes a truth."
He repeats this last phrase several times. Playboy's Hugh
Hefner, who counts Neiman among his best and oldest friends, suggests,
"He quite intentionally invented himself as a flamboyant artist not
unlike Salvador Dalí, in much the same way that I became
Mr. Playboy in the late '50s." Neiman and Hef both prize
props. Hefner's were his pajamas and pipe, Neiman's his
Dalíesque black moustache and long cigar that never seems to
burn down. Of secondary importance were Neiman's trendy white suits
and a selection of hats.
Neiman has had a moustache since he was first able to grow one, and he
has smoked since he was 16. "I came from a world of five-cent cigars
and whiskey drinking," Neiman recalls. "You were supposed to clean
your plate and finish the whole cigar. My first cigar was a Muriel
because I liked the name. I didn't know the first thing about good
taste or dollar-and-a-half cigars. My father, a roustabout gandy
dancer [railroad worker], smoked Dutch Masters, right down to the
bottom. This was no afterdinner smoke. I knew that Clark Gable smoked
cigars, and I knew there was something special about smoking. Not
everyone did it."
Abandoned by his father at an early age, Neiman and his mother, Lydia,
were forced to fend for themselves. Neiman distinguished himself by
drawing. He created a cartoon strip and tattoos for his friends. "I
had a natural talent and I used it to get favors, and then to earn
money to help feed my family," he says. "Growing up in St. Paul
[Minnesota], I used to do calcimine drawings on grocery store
windows. They were advertisements aimed at attracting customers. I'd
sketch a turkey, a cow, a fish, with the prices. And then I had the
good sense to draw the guy who owned the store. This gave me
tremendous power as a kid."
After serving in the Army in Europe from 1942 to 1945 during World War
II, and then studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago from
1946 to 1950, Neiman taught life drawing at the Art Institute and did
freelance fashion illustration. Walking on Chicago Avenue one evening
in 1954, he ran into Hefner, who was headed for a corner eatery aptly
named Banquet on a Bun. (Bunny banquets at the Playboy mansion were
yet to come.) The two had met a few years earlier in the offices of
Carson Pirie Scott, a local department store where Hefner worked as a
copywriter and Neiman as a freelance illustrator. When their paths
crossed again on the street, Hefner had published about five issues of
Playboy. He was working out of a brownstone near the Holy Name
Cathedral, around the corner from Neiman's basement apartment that
doubled as his studio. Neiman invited Hefner over.
An upright piano functioned as an easel, and the overhead pipes served
as racks for his clothes. "This was the classic starving-artist
scene," Hefner reminisced in Playboy's 40th anniversary issue
in January 1994. Neiman showed Hefner his paintings of people engaged
in the pursuit of pleasure, with a special emphasis on the sometimes
tarnished glitz and glitter of nightlife. The subjects included boxers
at Johnny Coulon's South Side gym, late-night action at the strip
joints along Clark Street, gamblers, bars, high life and low
life--from the Pump Room to the seediest Rush Street dive. Knocked out
by what he saw, Hefner brought his art director, Art Paul, around the
next day. Straightaway Paul commissioned Neiman to illustrate "Black
Country," a story by Charles Beaumont about a jazz musician. It won
Playboy its first art prize from the Chicago Art Directors Club
Show.
Thus began a personal and professional association with Hefner and his
soon-to-be-empire. In 1958, Neiman began a monthly feature for
Playboy called "Man At His Leisure." It would expose him to a
style of living a world apart from the struggle-to-survive,
street-gang life that he was raised in. For the next 15 years he
globe-trotted, observing the rich at play in the world's most
glamorous watering holes and sporting spots, delivering to
Playboy his impressions of what he saw. Whether it was the
Grand Prix auto race in Monaco, the Regatta of the Gondoliers in
Venice, or the Super Bowl in Miami, Neiman was there. Gambling at
Baden-Baden, sipping brandy at Claridge's and sketching at
Fouquet's--always with a long cigar--Neiman not only painted the dream
life; he began living it as well.
He catapulted from whiskey and five-cent cigars into the world of fine
wine and $30 cigars. "Horse owners and team
owners--connoisseurs--began putting top-notch cigars in my pockets and
pouring me first-class wine. I got used to it. Today my favorite cigar
is a Punch. People send them to me. They give me wine, champagne and
caviar, too. Always the best," he admits without qualms. "I don't buy
cigars, because my instincts are still the ones of my background. If I
go up to the cigar counter at '21' in New York, I might see cigars
that cost $8, $21 and $30, but my unconscious will automatically go
for a $6 brand."
Following his instincts has usually worked to Neiman's advantage. In
the early 1950s, Neiman met a ravishing black-haired young writer
named Janet Byrne, who was employed alongside Hugh Hefner in the copy
department of Carson Pirie Scott. She was also studying painting at
the Art Institute of Chicago where Neiman was teaching at the
time. They married in 1957 and have been a twosome ever since.
Today, Janet is a distinguished woman with bright white hair and an
air of subdued elegance. "She's my best friend," Neiman is quick to
acknowledge. "She's a very special woman whose intellect, judgment and
awareness has remained consistent over the years. I'm an artist who's
always lived freely, kept the hours I wanted. It takes a woman with a
lot of character to share that with you."
As enduring as Neiman's marriage has been his affluence. He is counted
by those in the know among the world's top-earning artists, and
considered by many to be number one. This is not surprising, given his
output. He does approximately a thousand pieces a year, including
paintings, sketches, drawings, watercolors and serigraphs. "I work
fast. Sometimes I do 40 sketches at one event. A painting generally
takes me from two to three weeks. I do about 25 a year," Neiman notes
matter of factly. Proud of the fact that no one else has ever put a
brush to one of his canvases, he works without studio
assistants. Original Neiman paintings (acrylics, oil, or a mix)
start at $20,000; they can shoot up to $500,000 for works such as
"Stretch Stampede," a mammoth 1975 oil painting of the Kentucky Derby
bearing that price tag.
The bulk of Neiman's business is his serigraphs, limited edition
prints of original paintings, using the silk screen process. Printed
in editions of 250 to 500, they are numbered and signed by the
artist. Hammer--and the hundreds of other galleries selling Neiman in
the United States--can't get enough of them. "Recently, 'La Cuisine
Française,' a restaurant scene of Paul Bocuse at a cheese and
fruit table on a background collage of wine bottle labels, sold out in
three and
a half weeks!" exults Richard Lynch, vice president of
Hammer Galleries. "They often sell out, sometimes in as little as 45
days, but usually in a matter of months." Neiman produces about six
different serigraph subjects a year. Generally priced from $3,000 to
$6,000 each, gross annual sales of new serigraphs alone top $10
million.
Neiman also does numerous private commissions: a drawing of a
corporate chief's wife here, a painting of a bon vivant's yacht
there. Not to mention the thousands of posters sold every year at $30
to $200 a pop, or the commercial ventures, such as the annual piece he
does for the Saks Fifth Avenue Christmas catalogue, his official
artist status at the '80, '84 and, most likely, '96 Olympics, the
limited edition racing skis he designed for Atomic, and the champagne
label he created for Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. He turns down nine
out of 10 offers, which include solicitations to reprint his work on
everything from sheets and towels to scarves and ties.
Burger King was among the few corporations to make Neiman an offer he
didn't refuse. In 1976, the hamburger chain gave away Neiman posters
in conjunction with an Olympics promotion. Printed on cheap paper, but
according to the artist's specifications, they were reproductions of
paintings of five different Olympic swimming and track and field
events done exclusively for Burger King. "I was picked on at the time,
accused of selling out," Neiman recalls. "But those posters were
distributed to kids who had never seen a painting before in their
lives, kids growing up the way I did. Hundreds of them have come up to
me, some now professional athletes themselves, asking me to autograph
the posters. They've held onto them for 20 years. The Burger King
project exposed my work to millions of people, so it was not a bad
thing." That, along with the live television appearances he made on
ABC as its on-camera artist during the '72 Olympic Games in Munich and
the '76 Games in Montreal, may have made LeRoy Neiman America's best
known artist.
"The guy is basically recession-proof," Lynch says. Neiman is not the
only one to score in this game. Sharing the spoils are the galleries
selling his work across the country and Knoedler Publishing, a
wholesale operation that was created in 1975 exclusively to publish
and distribute the graphics of LeRoy Neiman. These include serigraphs,
etchings, books and posters. From 1979 to 1985 Knoedler also published
a quarterly newsletter, Neiman News, which chronicled the
artist's activities and his latest releases, and reprinted articles
that had been published about him. Knoedler Publishing and Hammer
Galleries are divisions of Knoedler Modarco, Inc., a company owned by
the Hammer--as in Armand--family.
"There is nothing I've wanted that I don't have," Neiman says,
referring to his material success. But if there is an arena in which
his accomplishments have fallen short of his goals, it is in the art
world itself. He is the artist everyone loves to hate. Over the years,
prominent art critics like John Russell, Calvin Tomkins and Hilton
Kramer have, by and large, dismissed Neiman's work as commercial, or
they have ignored Neiman entirely. In 1989, when the New Haven
Register asked Kramer for a few thoughts on Neiman, he replied,
"That might be difficult. I never think of him."
As if to compensate for being snubbed by the art press, Neiman is in
the process of donating his archives to the Smithsonian Institution's
Archives of American Art, and in September he announced the creation
of the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University
with a $6 million gift to its School of the Arts. The artist believes
that official appreciation for his work will come later. He refers to
the present fascination with Florine Stettheimer, an early twentieth
century painter of New York's avant-garde whom Neiman has long
admired. "She was great and she was treated like absolutely nothing,"
Neiman says. "Time had to pass and sociology had to advance to bring
her recognition." He likens his own paintings and illustrations of our
world to the eighteenth century Venetian artist Giandomenico Tiepolo's
stylized renditions of the Venice of his day.
"I'm not a scene painter," Neiman says. "I'm the scene
painter." He has been applauded for his draftsmanship, his use of
vibrant color and his ability to capture more than just the character
of an individual subject. Like Toulouse-Lautrec--Neiman's favorite
painter early in his career--he puts all of his subjects into a larger
context, capturing the look, pace and atmosphere of a place. "I paint
what I see, not what I fantasize about," he says. "And I focus on the
beauty and the best. Sure, I'd rather paint a Rolls-Royce than a
Volkswagen. Not because of the snob appeal, but because a Rolls is a
better designed, better engineered machine. But if I do paint a Rolls,
I include the mechanic who's working on it, or the chauffeur driving
it. I paint the whole picture."
"What Audubon was to birds, Neiman is to society," asserts Kerig Pope,
managing art director of Playboy. He has worked with Neiman for
30 years on Playboy's Party Jokes page. Neiman illustrates the
monthly column with drawings of his "Femlin" character, an impish
nymphet whom he invented 40 years ago. He has not missed a deadline,
nor run out of props or poses for his creation, in 480 issues.
"If anyone tarnished my reputation as a serious artist, it was
myself, by playing around with Playboy and stuff," Neiman
admits. "But I learned a lot from those folks, and I don't regret it."
The tour of Neiman's quarters ends in an opulent room that serves
as his private office. A colossal eighteenth century crystal
chandelier hangs from the ceiling, huge fifteenth century Belgian
tapestries cover the white walls, and a pair of Venetian Renaissance
marble columns frames the space. It is the epitome of Old World
elegance. He takes out box after wooden box of Cuban Montecristos,
Davidoff Aniversario No. 1s and Don Joaquin maduros. Neiman's
conversation veers from the influences of Dufy and Matisse on his work
to his partiality to raw color. He talks technique and his old tricks:
"For a long time I was doing the unimportant things in focus, and the
very important things in shadow or in the dark in a disguise of some
sort, so you had to discover them."
The same could be said of the painter himself, the man behind the
props.
-Nancy Wolfson is a freelance writer who lives in New York
City.
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