LeRoy NeimanFor a detailed view and pricing information, click on a title. About LeRoy Neiman: Best known for his brilliantly colored, stunningly energetic images of sporting events and leisure activities, LeRoy Neiman is probably the most popular living artist in the United States. His art is unique. It stands alone, without any real comparison. It is an art that has become controversial because Neiman has broken the barriers of many of the most hallowed assumptions of modern art history and contemporary criticism. It is an art that is loved by millions of people throughout America and around the world.
LeRoy Neiman was born on June 8, 1921 in St. Paul, Minnesota to Charles Runquist, an unskilled laborer, and Lydia (Serline) Runquist. His surname is that of one of his stepfathers; during his childhood, his biological father abandoned the family, and his mother, whom he described to Jerry Tallmer for the New York Post (May 9, 1981) as "a very spirited woman, ahead of her times," later remarried twice. Raised in a rough blue-collar St. Paul neighborhood, LeRoy Neiman became a "street kid," in his words. He attended a Roman Catholic primary school, where, as he told Max Millard for the New York City Westside TV Shopper (January 27-February 2, 1979), he "was always drawing pictures and getting special treatment... showing off, copping out of other things." During recess periods, he would inscribe pen-and-ink tattoos on his classmates' arms. A painting of a fish that he made in sixth grade won a prize in a national art competition. In 1942, Neiman quit school and enlisted in the United States Army. While serving as a cook for four years, with two years of combat in Europe, he painted sexually suggestive murals in military kitchens and dining halls that reportedly generated enthusiastic responses from women as well as men. He also painted stage sets for Red Cross shows under the auspices of the army's Special Services division. "If nothing else, the army completely confirmed me as an artist," he wrote in his book, LeRoy Neiman: Art and Life Style (1974). "During this period I made my crucial discovery of the difference between the lifestyles of the officer and the Pfc (private first class). This was to become the basis of my later mission in art, to investigate life's social strata from the workingman to the multimillionaire." Between 1960 and 1970, Neiman produced a total of more than 100 paintings and two murals for 18 Playboy clubs. "Playboy made the good life a reality for me and made it the subject matter of my paintings — not affluence and luxury, as such, but joie de vivre itself," he told an interviewer for VIP Magazine (July 1962). In 1961, Neiman rented a studio in Paris. While living in France, he did studies of the Deauville social season and of famous French restaurants, and he won a gold medal at the Salon d'Art Moderne in Paris. Neiman also spent time in Italy, where he painted a regatta of gondoliers in Venice and the filmmaker Federico Fellini at work in Rome. His first solo shows outside the United States were held in galleries in London and Paris in 1962. After returning to the United States the next year, he established a studio in New York City. A few months later, he had his first one-person exhibit in New York, at the Hammer Galleries, which has since mounted another two dozen shows of his work. Among the more than 50 additional venues in the United States and overseas that have hosted solo Neiman exhibits are the Minnesota Museum of Art, in St. Paul; the University of Texas in El Paso; the Abbey Theatre, in Dublin, Ireland; the Museo de Bellas Artes, in Caracas, Venezuela; Casagrafica, in Helsinki, Finland; and the New State Tretyakov Museum, in Moscow. In 1988, a show of his artworks toured four cities in Japan.  Neiman has participated in dozens of group exhibitions as well, and in 1981, he took part in a two-man show with Andy Warhol at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, which purchased 19 of his prints in 1973, is one of the many public and private institutions that hold works by him in their permanent collections. Despite such recognition, art critics have, with few exceptions, totally ignored his work or dismissed it as superficial or vulgar.
According to Nancy Wolfson, Neiman may be the "most belittled artist of our time." Hundreds of works by Neiman appear in his books, which, in addition to Art and Life Style, include Horses (1979); LeRoy Neiman Posters (1980); Carnaval (1981); Winners (1983), which was published in Japanese in 1985; Monte Carlo Chase (1988); The Prints of LeRoy Neiman 1980-1990 (1991); Big Time Golf (1992); LeRoy Neiman, An American in Paris (1994); LeRoy Neiman On Safari (1997), The Prints of LeRoy Neiman 1990-2000 (2000), and his most recent, LeRoy Neiman Sketchbook: 1964 Liston vs. Clay - 1965 Ali vs. Liston (2005). Each year for the past quarter-century, Neiman has created at least eight limited-edition serigraphs (silkscreen prints); distributed by Knoedler Publishing, they are sold in selected galleries throughout the United States. According to an article in Manhattan (Winter 1995-96), the more than 150,000 Neiman prints that have been purchased to date "have an estimated market value exceeding $400 million." By his own account, LeRoy Neiman works very hard, has no hobbies, and does not take vacations. He paints in a double-height studio in the Hotel des Artistes, a landmark New York City building across the street from one of his favorite subjects — Central Park. In the same building he maintains an office; a penthouse pied-a-terre; and an apartment that he shares with his best friend — his wife, the former Janet Byrne, whom he married on June 22, 1957. His archives, which he is currently assembling for preservation at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C., are also kept there. Through the years, he has donated scores of his artworks to charitable organizations, and in 1995 he gave the School of the Arts at Columbia University, in New York City, a gift of $6 million to create the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies.    |
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