Man at Leisure

Artist LeRoy Neiman’s devotion to leisure and spectacle finds a Louisiana audience.

by

Touring the former studio of bon vivant LeRoy Neiman, the long-running author of Playboy’s “Man At His Leisure” column and one of America’s most recognizable visual artists, I had the guilty, swooping thrill you’d feel thumbing through someone else’s diary—if that diary belonged to a person who had traveled the globe, gathered it in his arms, and brought the whole lot back home with him. By the time Neiman passed away in June 2012 at age 91, it seemed he had done just that, leaving behind apartments that teemed with the detritus of an adventure-filled life.

Neiman’s studio (now home to the LeRoy Neiman Foundation, which controls and promotes his work) is a series of double-high lofts located in New York’s landmark Hotel des Artistes. I visited this past July at the foundation’s invitation, and, along with three of the foundation’s members, spent a morning sifting through Neiman’s sketchbooks, mementoes, and fine art collection.



There are the material objects: ornate tapestries dating back to the sixteenth century; boxing gloves that shielded the prized hands of Muhammad Ali in his bout against Earnie Shavers; and photograph upon photograph capturing strolls past the Louvre, encounters with presidents, and mirthful evenings with famous friends.



And the less tangible: stale smoke that tickled my nostrils each time the foundation’s curator Tara Zabor mentioned Neiman’s ever-present cigar; the faint rustle of pages as we stepped into Neiman’s library of art books, from which he read for hours every day; and the fondness that flickered over the faces of Zabor and the other foundation members as they related to me the travels and the endless anecdotes of the wildly popular artist.


LeRoy Neiman was known for his illustrations and paintings of pop culture leisure activities, from late-night gambling to jazz shows. But the works that showcased athletic excellence—striving, kinetic figures captured in moments of exquisite competition—are what earned him wild popularity during the 1960s, when sports fanaticism took a firm grip on America.

It’s not inappropriate, then, that the LSU Museum of Art chose the always-anticipated onset of football season to debut this latest exhibition at their downtown Shaw Center gallery. LeRoy Neiman: ACTION!, which opened on August 1 and will run until mid-January of next year, collects over seventy of the artist’s sketches, paintings, and prints into one Louisiana location. It’s the first display of its kind since the artist’s death, and Neiman’s colorful, loving depictions of pop culture should strike a chord with the region’s rabid sports fans. And while the exhibit provides immediate thrills to sports and art aficionados alike, it also spikes a certain amount of curiosity about the obsessive, technical virtuoso who made fine living into a career.

 


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Neiman’s domain was the leisure life, from smoky pool halls and prize fights to the deafening sidelines of football matches where he’d sit sketching the excitement that played out before his eyes. With saturated swatches and swirls of color—calling to mind heat maps that pulse with the glow of living, breathing forms—he captured post-war Americans clamoring for a good time, hell-bent on being carefree.



“LeRoy’s subject matter covers a very broad scope,” said Zabor. “The safari trips, the food, the sports, cars, animals—everything and everyone, really.”
 


Pictured left: "Big Band," a serigraph painted by the artist in 2005 at age eighty-four, still stands in his New York Studio. Photo by Lucie Monk.

Among the more notable figures depicted by Neiman are Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Louis Armstrong, and Joe Namath and the ’69 New York Jets. (Neiman was artist-in-residence when the team won the Super Bowl.)



He didn’t just depict the uber-famous, though. The mustachioed, cigar-chewing Neiman and his compulsive chronicling (“He never left home without his sketchbook,” said Andrew Decker, communications director for the foundation) soon drew the eyes of the public, including his celebrity subjects, many of whom he eventually counted as close friends. “When Sinatra died,” said Zabor, “LeRoy heard the news from Venice and took the first gondola he could find.”


But peer acceptance eluded Neiman and his representational art, at least while abstract expressionism ruled the roost. Though he trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and spent his whole life poring over art tomes, the high-selling, A-list artist couldn’t shake his populist image in the fine art community.

Nor was he willing to. As Neiman wrote in his memoir All Told: My Art and Life Among Athletes, Playboys, Bunnies, and Provocateurs: “Even when I'd start a painting in abstract, there was a subject lurking: a face, a place, a scenario would seductively emerge…” 

Neiman’s work confirms as much. His lurid brush strokes captured the confident, naked energies of elite athletes in their prime, of gamblers chasing a lucky feeling, of crowds in the perspiring pursuit of the good life. His art would have floundered without significant technical chops, required for the speed and accuracy with which Neiman rendered the world around him—particularly when that world centered on the human form. But to gain entrée to the fast-moving fun of the late 1950s, the trained artist employed a different sort of creativity. He invented LeRoy Neiman.


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LeRoy Runquist was born on June 21, 1921, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to “a reckless woman … as beautiful and spirited as a thoroughbred pawing the ground,” he wrote in his memoir. The last name he adopted—Neiman—was gifted from a stepfather (one of a series), though his other affectations were packaged separately. Neiman poached the cigar habit from the high rollers he observed at the racetracks. He grew out his mustache on the advice of Salvador Dali. He studied theories of leisure, taught fashion illustration, and adopted the boisterous zest of an Artist.


“He was invented. His lifestyle was invented,” said Steven Bond, the foundation’s president.



As a teen, Neiman gravitated toward the dim interiors of pool halls and bars, though the leisure life was not yet there to sketch. He came for the characters.

“That’s where the Roaring Twenties went,” wrote Neiman in All Told, “and where flashy small-time hustlers, stool pigeons, mutts, and rummies acted out their dreams. You’re in a bar. You tell a story. It’s a tall tale, but as long as happy hour is going on, everybody buys it, so it becomes true.”

As the gloom of the Second World War faded, magazines hopped onto the “lifestyle” bandwagon and eschewed the primness of pre-war attitudes. Enter Playboy and ultimate anti-prude Hugh Hefner.

 Neiman met the enterprising Hefner while the latter was toiling away as a copywriter at a department store, and he ultimately landed a position as Playboy’s first artist-in-residence and author of its “Man at His Leisure” travel column for fifteen years. Benefits included guaranteed good times, which Neiman duly documented.

“Every major sporting event that took place from the mid-sixties until probably the late ‘90s or early ‘00s, he was there,” said Bond.

But despite being friends with many A-list celebrities, he was never attracted to fame for fame’s sake. “He was enamored with the celebrities that came from nowhere,” said Bond. “The self-made people. He was able to connect with them.”

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The success in which Neiman reveled was a product of both his thoughtfully built persona and the lucky intersection of his interests with a burgeoning middle class that had time and money to spare. The personality he created was, in essence, an all-access pass to the beautiful things, a luxurious world free of worry; and this environment provided endless fodder for Neiman.

But one can’t downplay the substantial contribution that his earnestness and technical virtuosity lent to his success—despite the less-than-generous opinions of his peers. Now, just two years after his death, the foundation that was left to care for his legacy is attempting to right that wrong through exhibitions like the one launched at the LSU MOA. And what better place to host the inaugural exhibition than Louisiana, where the prevailing ethos is a deep-rooted love for leisure and celebration.

 

Details. Details. Details.

LSU MOA
100 Lafayette Street
Baton Rouge, La. 
(225) 389-7200
lsumoa.org