Bebeto Matthews, Associated Press
The New York Times
obituary of artist LeRoy Neiman, who died last week at 91, called him “one of
the most popular artists in the United States,” but noted that art critics did
not hold him in much esteem. His popularity rivaled American favorites like
Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses and Andrew Wyeth, according to obituary writer
William Grimes, but he never managed to win any critical acclaim during his
long life.
“Mr. Neiman’s kinetic, quickly executed paintings and
drawings, many of them published in Playboy,
offered his fans gaudily colored visual reports on heavyweight boxing matches,
Super Bowl games and Olympic contests, as well as social panoramas like the
horse races at Deauville, France and the Cannes international Film Festival,”
the obituary explained. But although “he generated hundreds of works, including paintings,
drawings, watercolors, limited edition serigraph prints and coffee-table books
yearly, earning gross annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars,” the
critics were not impressed.
“Although he
exhibited constantly and his work was included in the collections of dozens of
museums around the world, critical respect eluded him,” Grimes wrote. “Mainstream art critics ignored him completely
or, if forced to consider his work, dismissed it with contempt as garish and
superficial—magazine illustration with pretensions. Mr. Neiman professed not to care.”
My husband Nick and I knew LeRoy back in the days when we
lived in Manhattan. (We also knew
his brother Earl C. Neiman, who was an artist specializing in religious art, which
is a long way from Playboy—the magazine
that made Leroy famous.)
I always admired Neiman’s skill and his ability to draw the
figure in motion—which made him probably the world’s most famous painter of
sports figures. He worked so fast
and so effortlessly that he often painted live on television at major sporting
events, watched by an audience of millions.
Neiman was drawing all the time. He kept cards of stiff paper in his pocket and, in a
restaurant or at a dinner party or while deep in conversation, he would take out
a card and a black felt pen and sketch one or two of the people in front of him,
who often didn’t realize what he was doing. Then he would sign the sketch and
hand it over to the subject.
You could say that this was a parlor trick that LeRoy did to
win people over, but you could
also say that, like many artists, he just had to keep making art out of what he
saw in front of him. Wasn’t
Picasso known for drawing and painting on tablecloths, napkins, restaurant
menus and everything else he could find while enjoying himself at a party or meal?
In Saturday’s Times,
a couple of days after the obituary, Ken Johnson wrote “An Appraisal: Fame Without a Legacy-- The Art of LeRoy
Neiman Made a Splash But Never Waves”
Johnson wrote that, when he went to art school, a popular
criticism was “It looks like a
LeRoy Neiman” …“It referred to the splashy, garish, instantly recognizable
style of illustration, a formulaic mix of impressionism, expressionism and
realism, that Mr. Neiman used to make himself one of the most famous artists in
America.” Neiman’s art, he said,
was “All frosting, no cake.”
The reporter went on to say that serious art critics
considered Neiman, “the archetypical hack…With his ever-present cigar and
enormous mustache, he was a cliché of the bon vivant and a bad artist in every
way.”The analysis goes on in this vein and points out that in the
serious art world it was felt that,
“Art should be in some way critical of mainstream culture” rather than
celebrating it.
Toward the end of his appraisal, Mr.Johnson writes: “Mr.
Neiman is not the only celebrated artist to be marginalized by the
cognoscenti. Walt Disney, Salvador
Dali, Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth all incurred suspicion for the taint of
kitsch attached to their work. But
it is hard to deny the aesthetic and moral interest of what they did, so they
have their high-minded apologists….Is the serious art world wrong to exclude
and disdain Mr. Neiman and his art?
I don’t think so.”
Well, I may be volunteering to be a high-minded apologist
for LeRoy Neiman. An artist
myself, who has taken a zillion figure-drawing classes, I was always in awe of
the skill with which he could capture the figure in motion.
In the olden days it was fashionable to scorn the art of
Norman Rockwell, because of the
sentimentality behind it, but today people are taking another look at Rockwell
and saying, “Damn, could he paint!”
Meanwhile, The New York Times and other serious art forums review very seriously things like the three piles of dirt that Yoko Ono is currently displaying at the Serpentine Gallery in London in her new exhibit “To The Light”, and the endless series of pranks by famous artist Marina Abramovic who, when she was younger, would have herself videotaped naked, banging her head against a wall or hanging on a cross. Now that she’s older, she captured the media’s interest during her long stint at MOMA two years ago when she spent hours every day, (clothed in a long dress) sitting at a table staring, immobile, into the eyes of whatever art fan came to stare back at her. Many of these fans, overcome at being in her presence, burst into tears. I nearly burst into tears when reading the admiring reviews of her retrospective from all the “serious” art critics.
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