Leroy Neiman: Verve and Verisimilitude
Capturing Momentous Events in Exotic Locales
I guess I was attracted not so much to Leroy Neiman’s art but to the artist’s life he lived. The dashing and jet setting personna he invented for himself, with the ear-to-ear mustache, white suits, and Cuban cigars, is one that appealed to me. LeRoy Neiman (1921-1912) always got close to the action, to celebrity and to society life.
Over the course of his successful art career he generated hundreds of paintings, drawings, watercolors and serigraph prints. Much of that work was sourced by the drawings he created on the spot.
In 1953, Neiman began his patronage by Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine. Over the next 50 years, some of Neiman's contributions included creating the Femlin character for the Party Jokes page and the ‘Man at His Leisure’ feature, where he went on assignment to glamor spots around the world, sending back visual reportage on subjects as varied as the races at Royal Ascot, the nude beaches of the Dalmatian coast, the running of the bulls at Pamplona and Carnaby Street in swinging London.
But it was Neiman’s coverage of sporting events, like the momentous heavyweight championship prize fight in 1964 between Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay(later Muhammad Ali), where he produced his most exciting work. These early drawings display an energy and flair that his later artworks lack.
They show the young Cassius Clay as the poetry-spouting, consummate entertainer in high contrast to the scowling Sonny Liston. Neiman records Clay's taunting and trash-talking of Liston, in the gym leading up to the fights. He draws the drama and cacophony at the fight itself at the Miami Beach Convention Hall. His proximity to the action provides an intimate first person perspective that shows in his on-the-spot sketches.
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