Part 42

This is as far as their similarity goes, however. Rockwell, who died in November, 1978 at the age of 84, was known for his meticulously detailed, placid portraits of American family life, while Neiman has built his reputation on action-filled scenes composed of bold splashes of color. Rockwell's career started and ended at the Saturday Evening Post; Neiman's began at Playboy and has reached its zenith in an entirely new medium -- television. His televised mural of the 1976 Olympic Games was seen by an estimated 170 million people.

One of the most commercially successful artists in the world, LeRoy Neiman has spent the last 18 years living and working in a huge apartment/studio just off Central Park West. His original paintings command up to $50,000 each, but the larger portion of his work comes out in the form of limited-edition serigraphs (silkscreen prints). A single piece of silkscreen art generally yields some 300 prints, each of which sells for about $1,500.

Neiman's eye-catching style is admired everywhere. His posters and calendars are best-sellers in Japan; several of his painting are on permanent display at the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. He was the official United States artist-in-residence for the last two Olympics and will be for the 1980 Games as well. Although best known for his sports pictures, Neiman is also a renowned portraitist who specializes in famous faces. He is attracted by drama and excitement of any kind, whether found in a tavern inhabited by the Beautiful People, in a heavyweight fight, in a world chess championship, or, as television viewers witnessed last January, in a Super Bowl. Neiman sat on the sidelines of that contest drawing pictures of the game in progress, using a computer-controlled electronic pen and palette. The pictures were then flashed onto the television screen.

"It's painting with light," explains Neiman one morning in his studio, taking a break from the half-dozen oils and acrylics he is working on. "It gives you the same sense of creation as any other art medium. You're building and creating an image of your own that wasn't there when you started. The only limitation you ever have in doing a work of art is yourself."

Starting this month, Neiman's work has become a regular feature of CBS Sports Spectacular. At the beginning and end of each program, Neiman's paintings are interspersed with photographs of athletes to form a moving collage of colors and shapes. The artist has been contracted to make six or seven personal appearances on the program over the next year, in which he will demonstrate the art of drawing sports in action.

Neiman is a suave, sophisticated man who loves his work and loves to talk about it. Dressed in a fancy denim-style suit, with a long, thin cigar protruding from under his handlebar moustache, he expounds on a score of subjects as if he had all the time in the world. In the adjacent room, the telephone rings almost unceasingly. It is answered by his assistant, who calls out the message to him. More likely than not, it is a request for Neiman's artistic services.

"I sketch all the time," he says. "A sketch is not necessarily a study to me. It's a record -- something to consult with. I sketch an awful lot in public. Because when I go someplace and I get bored, I sketch. Everybody forgives me for it. They think I have an uncontrollable desire to draw."

His style, says Neiman, "came out of nowhere. It happened very suddenly, about 1954, just before I started with Playboy." That magazine recently honored him with an award for being one of the five most important contributors in its 25-year history.

During his childhood in Minnesota, recalls Neiman, "I was always drawing pictures and getting special treatment at school -- showing off, copping out of other things. ... I lived a couple of years in England and France." since moving to New York, he has been a constant Westsider. Central Park, says Neiman, "is the West Side's front yard, but the East Side's back yard."

Neiman's latest one-man show is an exhibit of approximately 50 serigraphs, etching, and drawings at Hammer Graphics on East 57th Street. Part of the proceeds from sales will go to the U.S. Olympic Committee.

"I turn most things down, because they're not stimulating and inspiring," says Neiman matter-of-factly. "Money isn't enough stimulus to do something I don't like. ... I work very hard. I fool around a lot too, but I don't go on vacations. I don't have hobbies. I put my vices within my craft."

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WESTSIDER ARNOLD NEWMAN Great portrait photographer

12-1-79

When the Sunday Times of London decided to hire someone to photograph 50 leading British citizens for a show at England's National Portrait Gallery, the venerable newspaper caused something of an uproar by choosing an American for the job -- Arnold Newman, one of the world's most important portrait photographers for the past 30 years.

The 50 portraits, whose subjects include Sir Lawrence Oliver, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Alec Guinness, Henry Moore, Lord Mountbatten and Harold Pinter, were exhibited last month at the Light Gallery on Fifth Avenue, and have just opened in London. Meanwhile, the book version of the prints, with extensive commentary, has been published this month as The Great British (New York Graphic Society, Boston, $14.95). The photographs, like those found in Newman's three previous books and in his hundreds of assignments for Life, Look, Newsweek and other publications, are far more than mere portraits. Rather, they are profound artistic statements, in which the background of the picture often symbolizes the person's achievement.

"I don't use props: I use reality," explains Newman, taking a break at the West 57th Street studio he has occupied since 1948. On the wall are pictures -- he prefers that word to "photographs" -- of Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Eugene O'Neill and four American presidents; Newman has photographed every president since Truman.

Big, burly, mellow-voiced and casually dressed, Arnold Newman at 61 looks like an aging beatnik. His quick wit and ready laugh mask a perfectionism that has characterized his work ever since he turned to photography in 1938. His ability "to make the camera see what I saw" showed itself almost at once. In 1941 he held his first exhibition and sold his first print to the Museum of Modern Art.

"I could have made, over the years, a hell of a lot more money than I have, simply by doing more commercial work and cashing in on my reputation. But that doesn't interest me," he reflects, puffing on his ever present cigar. "I mean, money interests me, but I'd just see my life being wasted."

Specializing in portraits of artists, he studies the work of each subject intensely beforehand so that the essence of the artist will be distilled into the photograph, by subconscious as well as conscious effort. On the side, he does enough commercial work to support his own artistic efforts. But over the years, the two have somehow merged: "I'm forever being commissioned for things I'd give my eye teeth to do, and paid very well for it. Recently I went out to do a photograph strictly on my own of somebody I admired, and I hate the picture. Yet the day before I did a picture for money which I think is one of my best pictures in the last three years."

In 1953, he went to Washington to photograph 15 U.S. senators for Holiday magazine, including John F. Kennedy -- then a political unknown who was sometimes labeled the Playboy senator. "Years later," recalls Newman, "I was photographing President Kennedy on the White House lawn. He turned to me and said, 'Arnold, whatever happened to that first picture you took of me?'

"I said, 'Well, Mr. President, we did 15 senators, and they found out they had one too many for the layout, so they dropped the one least likely to succeed.'

"And you have to understand: we were surrounded by secret servicemen, and Pierre Salinger, his press secretary, was there. Well I thought I'd get a big yack, because Kennedy had a marvelous sense of humor. But instead, his face went rigid. And I -- I absolutely turned ice cold. The Secret Service men turned around and gave me a 'How stupid can you be?' look.

"A bit later I managed to get into Pierre's office and started stammering and apologizing. Suddenly Pierre started breaking out in laughter. I said, 'What the hell's so funny?' He said, 'He was pulling your leg! He's been walking all around the White House for the last 30 minutes, telling that story on himself.'"

After the assassination, Newman was called to the White House again to photograph the official portrait of Lyndon Johnson. "He could give an angel an ulcer. ... I didn't get paid for the picture, not even my expenses. It cost me a fortune."

Arnold and his wife Augusta have been married for 31 years; she runs the studio and works closely with him. Their two sons, Eric and David, are professionals in neurology and architecture, respectively. The Newmans' favorite neighborhood restaurants include Rikyu and Genghiz Khan's Bicycle on Columbus Avenue, and the Cafe des Artistes on their own block.

Asked whether he eventually plans to pursue other areas of photography besides portraits, Newman shakes his head. "The whole history of painting was changed by a man who used the same materials as everybody else did -- the same brushes, paints, canvas, and subject matter," he explains. "So why do we say that Cezanne revolutionized painting? It's his ideas. I deal with ideas too."

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