Still Living The Good Life

BY BILL DOOLITTLE | PHOTO MARY YATES

LEROY NEIMAN DIDN’T SET OUT TO PAINT the world’s most colorful events and lead a life of fame and glamour.

Playboy made him do it.

“Playboy is responsible for spoiling me, because they sent me on the road — selling my art and the Playboy image,” said Neiman, who hit the road for the gentleman’s magazine in the late 1950s and never stopped.

Neiman has painted it all — Wimbledon, Derby, Masters, Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe, McEnroe, can-can girls, cool jazz, penthouse pads and Olympiads.

Almost instantly, the young artist’s distinctive style became synonymous with the colorful people and places he was painting —fast, exciting, vivid — and Neiman found himself stepping smoothly into the world of the stars he depicted.

Suddenly, there was an ABC television camera peeking over his shoulder as he painted the Olympics. Then we’d catch a glimpse of his slicked-back hair and handlebar mustache at Churchill Downs as he crossed the track on Derby Day, unlit cigar in one hand, a blonde on his arm.

“I paint the good life, and the good life is downright enjoyable,” said Neiman, who, at 86, is as comfortable with his own celebrity as he is with the deft strokes that bring the “good life” to life.

On an October day in 2007, Neiman was in Louisville at the Cobalt Artworks gallery on West Main Street to sign prints of “Ryder Cup 2008,” the official art he has created for the Ryder Cup, to be held at Valhalla Golf Club this coming September. In the lead-up to that event, Cobalt Artworks is featuring an almost yearlong Neiman show.

“We had the contract to produce and market Mr. Neiman’s Ryder Cup 2008, and we could have just done that and stopped there,” said Ben Isaacs, a partner in Cobalt Artworks. “But we thought it would be fantastic to have a year-long LeRoy Neiman showcase in Louisville, leading up to the Ryder Cup. And LeRoy really liked the idea.

“Ryder Cup and golf is the major theme, but part of the show will revolve a bit to enable us to exhibit more of LeRoy Neiman’s work,” Isaacs continued. “Around Derby time, for example, we’ll feature more racing art. But then as the event nears, it’ll be all Ryder Cup all the time.”

Blue sees Neiman as a national treasure.

“Anytime Louisville can be associated with something major league like the Ryder Cup, that’s the kind of event we want to be involved with,” Blue said. “We see the gallery as another jewel in the historic Main Street corridor, and, like our proposed Iron Quarter development, will be a destination for visitors and residents, alike.”

“Ryder Cup 2008” reflects the way Neiman views golf, artistically. “First of all, golf is a landscape sport,” he said. “It’s got a headquarters, a central point – the clubhouse. And the clubhouse is nifty. It’s a period thing. It’s an expression of the community, the area. Here at Valhalla, or at any of the great courses around the world, the architecture of the clubhouse gives you a pretty good idea of a place, it’s culture.”

Especially in Scotland, where ancient royalty permeates the British Open. “At St. Andrews, you can’t even go in the clubhouse, its so sacred,” he chuckles. “Like cricket: ‘Oh, you can’t walk on the grass there, sir.’ It’s sacred.”

“So they all have their distinctive characteristics,” he said. “But one thing is constant: that it is a pleasure to go into the clubhouse. And its even more of a pleasure if you can go into the locker room, be around these great golfers and hear them talk about how they feel about their round.”

It’s more than just the landscape. For the competitors, golf is a test of concentration and will.

“One thing that’s really remarkable about these big tournaments — you look at it on television, guys are swinging, walking around. But when they come in after 18 holes in a round of a tournament, these guys are really worn out. They’re completely deflated — or exhilarated. Some of these courses are really deadly. I think these golfers, the men and the women, they’re all extraordinary. You don’t hear enough about their strength. Th  ey’re really athletes.”

So Neiman is determined to catch the athletic flame of the great players of the game. Like in his 1973 portrait of Arnold Palmer, driving from the tee at Augusta National. Or Tiger Woods today.

“I was in Paris a few years back,” Neiman said. “There was some tournament going on at St. Cloud. I had never heard of him. He was a college player — no, he was younger than that. He was 15 years old, I think. And here was this kid, lanky, like a whip. He made a special impression on me. I made a couple of drawings of him. After seeing him then, what he’s done has not been so surprising. Now he’s so big and powerful, and, My God, the arms on him. He’s just a superman.”
So when sports historians look back to chronicle the age of Tiger, they’ll want to get a look at Neiman’s sketches of the 15-year-old Tiger, in Paris, in the same way biographers would wish to read the letters of young George Washington when he was a lieutenant in the French and Indian War.

Certainly there are photographs of young Tiger, but Neiman’s art impression could more revealing than photojournalism. In part, perhaps, because Neiman can place a star in his moment.

He glanced around the room, where portraits of stars were sprinkled among the Ryder Cup images. “You have celebrities in these events,” he explained. “As in Secretariat in the Derby. There next to each other are Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. There’s Frank Sinatra. So you deal in a world of celebrities.

And before you could roll at the word, he finishes the thought.

“Celebrities — it’s overdone now, we all know that,” Neiman continued. “Still, you can’t deny the role they play because everybody recognizes them, and you have a responsibility (as an artist) to measure up to them. They’re always confident, always on a role, and you’ve got to include that in your work. You can’t just view them as an ordinary person, because they’re not. Their fame is based on something they’ve accomplished.”

A good example of the Neiman’s journalistic legacy came with the death of Bill Hartack, the five-time Kentucky Derby winning jockey. Hartack was a dark figure, “tortured, in many ways,” says Neiman, who knew Hartack in Chicago when the rider was at the top of his game riding for Calumet Farm.

For its Hartack obituary, The New York Times picked an Associated Press shot of Hartack and Iron Liege beating Bill Shoemaker and Gallant Man at the wire in the 1957 Derby. But another way to illustrate Hartack, might be with Neiman’s classic portrait of the rider at Hialeah. Standing, arms crossed.

“He had an apartment in L.A. The whole apartment was painted in black … ” Neiman began. “No, that was at Hialeah. He had one in Hialeah and Montgomery Clift had one in L.A. And that was weird. These guys have the walls painted black and all the furniture was black.”

On the other hand, there was the much sunnier Bill Shoemaker.

“Shoe was a great, great figure,” recalled Neiman. “We used to go to Chasson’s, in L.A. and he would tend bar. This little guy, barely as tall as the bar.”

He recalls Angel Cordero at the top of his game in New York. “He was the first jockey I ever saw doing calisthenics in the jockey’s room before a race. The other jocks would be reading the paper, shooting pool and all that. Angel would be exercising.”

That’s the journalism of LeRoy Neiman. The inside look of a guy who is on the inside.

But there is also the view from the outside. The painter’s style. The LeRoy Neiman look.
As a kid in St. Paul, Neiman earned money drawing pictures of fruits and vegetables for neighborhood groceries to display in their windows. Then he started painting the grocer into the picture with the vegetables, and business picked up. He studied at the famous Art Institute of Chicago, then taught there. And it was in Chicago that he became pals with an ad agency copywriter named Hugh Hefner.

And if there is always a story that goes with it, then the story goes that one day Neiman found a bunch of discarded cans of bright enamel paints, left behind at a construction site near his apartment in Chicago. Artists love found objects and leftover materials (probably because they’re free). Any sort of this-and-that snatches of things they can carry back to the studio to make art.

Like half-filled cans of bright-colored paint.

Which might have been just what Neiman needed, said art critic F. Lanier Graham. “Freely-flowing paint makes possible fast-moving strokes. With fast-moving strokes, one can render the impression of fast-moving action.”

And fast-moving strokes that could capture fast-moving action was just what Hefner was looking for Playboy. Neiman’s “Man at his Leisure” became as recognizable a feature in the magazine as the Playboy centerfold. Well, almost

.“Just look at one year, 1960,” Isaacs said. “After painting the Winter Olympic scene at Squaw Valley, Calif., Playboy sent him to Europe for the Grand National steeplechase, the Epsom Derby at Ascot, Oxford-Cambridge rowing, Tour d’Argent in France, Maxim’s in Paris, the Lido, Folies Bergere, the Cannes Film Festival, the Grand Prix of Monaco. Bull fights in Spain – more than one person could hope to do in a lifetime, he did in one year!”

With favorite stops, over a career.

“Boxing is my sport,” said Neiman, who is a fixture at the big championship fights, and First Saturdays in May at Churchill.

“The Derby, that’s the top,” said Neiman. “It’s a carnival. And it’s wonderful. You have all these people who clock, and all that stuff. Who hose down a horse, and examine him, every little thing. They care about the animal.”

One of Neiman’s most reproduced works is his paddock scene at the 1997 Kentucky Derby. The guys are dashing, the dolls are beautiful.

“This is a city that can deal with celebrities and big events, and people like to come here because of that,” Neiman said. “And it’s a town on the rise. Especially downtown, it’s making progress. They’re making Main Street really special.”

The “Good life” in downtown Louisville?

“Well,” he said, “The main street in Louisville is called Main Street. That says a lot right there."