LeRoy Neiman (1921–2012)

I don’t remember when I first became aware of LeRoy Neiman’s art but I do remember when I became a true fan. It was when I saw the cover Nieman did for Frank Sinatra’s album “Duets”. A few weeks after Neiman's death I learned about his autobiography / memoir All Told: My Art and Life among Athletes, Playboys, Bunnies, and Provocateurs. Reading it was a joy filled trip through the twentieth century with one of its outstanding individualists.

Neiman, born in 1921, and his older brother were raised their mother in St. Paul, Minnesota. The family was poor even during the Roaring Twenties, the Depression forced the boys to take temporary refuge at their grandparents farm, allowing the family to at least not sink into deeper poverty. Neiman took to the street life early, exploring the city while playing hooky from school. Exploring the state capitol building in Minneapolis he first became intrigued with art. He was puzzled over how it was possible to paint the glass in eyeglasses of the former governors.

After serving in World War Two as a cook, although he was often AWOL, and spending a year with the occupation forces, as a painter, he decided that the GI Bill was his ticket to a better life. He returned to Minneapolis, earned his high school diploma, and went to study art at the Art Institute of Chicago. This was the beginning of a long association between Nieman and the school, he started teaching fashion illustration before he graduated and, as I learned on a visit to Chicago, Nieman recently provided the school with its first student center which opened shortly before his death.

In Chicago, working temporarily as a fashion illustrator, he met, on the same day, Janet Byrne, who he would marry and spend the rest of his life with, and Hugh Hefner, who he would work with until 2008 when Nieman cut back his schedule. I don’t want to simply recap the story of Nieman’s life here, you will enjoy it more in his own words and pictures. Neiman's art and a lifetime of photographs are generously used throughout the book and they are printed in the quality you would expect from the namesake of Columbia University’s LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies.

The second half of the book is more memoir than autobiography, by that I mean that the arrangement is more topical than chronological. Neiman's life was too full of five star events and encounters with all types of celebrities be condensed into a book in any other way. His friendships with Ali, Sinatra, and Miss Lillian, President Carter’s mother, provide some of the best stories in the book. Thanks to Neiman's writing style, he has a friendly, conversational voice that is very easy to read, there is no part of the book that I would say was less than entertaining.

According to Neiman he always wanted to paint like Jackson Pollock but “faces kept coming through the paint”. Throughout the book Neiman freely drops the names of artists and works that he admired. Some of those names, like Pollock and George Bellows, I was already familiar with but his descriptions of their works managed to ignite a curiosity about many of the others and I will be looking for them whenever I visit a museum.… (altro)