The Art of LeRoy Neiman
A Stylistic and Socialogical Analysis

By: F. Lanier Graham
Reprinted from The Prints of LeRoy Neiman, Volume I

CONCLUSION: Man, Myth, and Magic

The role of the realist painter has become quite complex since the advent of Abstract Expressionism. In one form or another, Social Realism has been the backbone of American painting for most of our nation's history. Suddenly it was not. For decades now, the majority of our most distinguished critics have convinced the art world that the mainstream of American painting is non-figurative. And most art historians would agree that between the late 1940s and the 1970s it has been non-figurative work that has occupied the hearts and minds of the majority of our most important painters. What the art magazines and the art museums have most consistently celebrated during this period is Action Painting and the Color Field painting from Still, Rothko and Newman, to Frankenthaler, Louis, Noland, Reinhardt, Stella and all the others.

Realism quickly became unfashionable. Social Realism changed media. Photojournalism took over from painting the social function of portraying our collective reality. The only images we as a people have had of our social being have come to us by means of newspapers, magazines, TV, and the movies.

When the traditional desire of Americans for realistic images reemerged in the form of Pop Art in the 1960s, it was generally considered a side-current rather than part of the new mainstream. It was many, many years before The Museum of Modern Art finally, reluctantly decided to exhibit Pop Art. Over time, the remarkable artistic achievements of Rauschenberg, Johns, Oldenburg, and all the others forced the art world to reconsider. The magazines and the museums gradually gave the New Realism more and more respect. During the course of the 1970s, various forms of Super Realism and Photo Realism started to become quite popular, and respectable. Realism is coming back in style, and probably will be even stronger in the reality-oriented 1980s.

So it is not only in the area of style that Neiman has been between categories. The same is true from the point of view of mythology. The modern myth is that "real artists" are poor, struggling, usually misunderstood, frequently in pain, and generally spurned by the general public. Neiman does not fit with any part of this modern myth. Everything seems to be exactly the opposite with him. All the evidence points to him being happy, healthy, well-fed (in fact, wealthy), and very much liked by millions of people who feel they understand him completely. And this is all quite disconcerting to those who believe in the modern myth. On the other hand, he fits quite well with the traditional idea of what an artist should be: one who can be understood by all social classes. No painter has ever appealed to everyone. But the range of Neiman's audience is extremely large, from the taxi-driver to the aristocrat.

Artists have not always been thought of as starved individuals barely stay-ing alive in garrets at the outside edges of society. This modern myth did not start until the 19th century. For the vast majority of human history, the artist has been a highly honored, respected member of society because of the artist's ability to provide magical services - because of the capacity of the artist to visualize those aspects of life that are most meaningful to the society they are serving. More often than not, this has been story-telling of one kind or another, usually stories of mythological heroes and heroines whose values are those of the people.

It was the duty of the traditional artist to perpetuate the Sacred Myths. Keep in mind that the word "Myth" is not being used in the popular sense of being an untruth. Here we are talking about Myth in the traditional sense of being a statement of what are considered eternal truths that work as a binding force of unquestioned assumptions for society as a whole. As Joseph Campbell, the distinguished mythologist, has said, "each of us has private dreams. Myths are the public dreams that all members of a society share.

During the European Middle Ages, for example, when a master painter completed an altarpiece it was an occasion for public rejoicing, as the most sacred images of the community were carried through the streets from the Guildhall to the Cathedral. It was a collective, unifying value-system that the artists and the people were celebrating together. And that's the way things have been in the traditional world for thousands of years, in fact, for more than 99% of human history.

It was not until after the Industrial Revolution, and the political revolu-tions that followed, that traditional agrarian society fell apart, and had to be constructed all over again. The modern industrialized urban society that was built up in Europe and the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries decided that art and artists were not very important - decorative, yes, but not extremely valuable. And so things have tended to remain until quite recently. In the language of psychophysiology, modern society became left-brain in its orientation, stressing "readin', 'ritin' & 'rithmetic" in the schools in order to produce citizens who are logical, aggressive, and oriented towards the values of our individual reality. In this society much less attention is paid to the right-brain's capacity to be visual, emotionally receptive to aesthetic experience, and oriented towards the values of our collective reality.

The result is a very unbalanced world. Art remains a very low priority in our schools and in our homes. Only a small percentage of society has any direct contact with original works of art. Very few painters are actually able to earn a living by painting. So the problem is much deeper than the bias of East Coast critics. But critics who recognize only one kind of art in a democratic society do not help the social situation as a whole.

Happily, things have improved somewhat since World War II. As Dore Ashton observed in The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (1972), none of the famous Abstract Expressionists were able to earn even a modest living from their work until the 1950s. Today, most of the best known Pop Artists and Color Field painters are earning comfortable incomes. Several have become millionaires. This is a striking sociological fact. Never before in the history of American painting has this much financial recognition been given to living American painters. This has happened because of a combination of good art and good business practices. Now, across the nation, and around the world, there is something that can really be called a Fine Arts Industry, in the same way that there is a Publishing Industry, or a Theatre Industry. And the truly popular artists have begun to command the same kind of incomes as popular writers, movie-stars, and professional athletes.

None of this could be happening if it were not for the fact that the general public has started to demand that there be more art in their lives. The idea that art is important to family life is coming back. The idea that art is important to community life is coming back. The idea that art is important to corporate life is coming back. Art is coming back towards the central place (at the very middle of life) which it has occupied for 99% of human history. The art museums which served only a few thousand people a year two decades ago, now are serving tens of millions of people a year. Indeed, art museums are now a major part of the multi-billion dollar Fine Arts Industry, as business managers start to replace art historians as museum administrators.

Nevertheless, in spite of all this new art world of advertising and merchandizing, no American painter of 60s and 70s has been catapulted into the semi-shamanic status of Popular Hero except LeRoy Neiman. So he must be touching something down deep - a depth that almost seems to be at the "archetypical" level of traditional heroes and heroines, the dwelling place of the Image Maker who also is the Myth Maker.

Each generation has had its own set of heroes and heroines. At the turn of the century, there were those very popular book illustrators from N.C. Wyeth to Maxfield Parrish who were the last to illuminate the heroes and heroines of agrarian mythology. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was Norman Rockwell on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post celebrating the values of a recently urbanized nation that was still longing for its agrarian roots. Then came Andrew Wyeth in the 40s and 50s with his haunting realism infused with the kind of penetrating insights into the psychology of individual human beings that usually is found in the writings of our best poets and novelists. Wyeth is as rural and as sophisticated as Steinbeck or Faulkner.

The imaging of social values is important. Unless values are symbolized they cannot be exchanged. Unless values are visualized continuously they cannot be lived by a society of people.

All the artists mentioned in this chapter have been in touch with the peo-ple to some degree, or they wouldn't be making so much money. As Alfred Frankenstein reminds us in his preface to this book, artists since the Stone Age have been offering value-laden images to the fellow members of their society. Only by being connected could they fulfill their public purpose - to render images of such power that Truth can be illuminated. The same connection between the artists and the people continued through the ages of Egypt, Greece and Rome; continued through the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance of Europe; and continued through government-supported Public Works of the 1930s and 40s.

Then, when the human figure suddenly vanished, the psychological connecting link was broken. The American public was left with little to identify with, to empathize with, until a new artist-hero emerged who was able to "tell the stories" they could understand and love. During the 1970s, America's best-known artist-hero has been LeRoy Neiman. The people he paints are the heroes of the totally urbanized middle classes: The athletes, the musicians and movie stars, and those colorful members of various social classes who are in love with joie-de-vivre and passionately in pursuit of happiness. For the first time in the history of American art, a city boy has become an artistic hero to millions. Neiman renders the lives of the people as they would like to be.

So it should not be surprising that Neiman-loving urbanites like neon-flavored "shocking pink," or that the experience of "Neiman Green" is as shrill as a high jazz note. There are the sights and sounds of the city. It would be surprising if there were not a lot of flash and glitter in his palette and in his legend.

The people love what he does with powers they believe are truly magical. And he loves doing it. "For me," says Neiman, "communication is what it's all about. Art is simply the means by which it happens. It's something that just passes through me and on to them." What he is communicating are images of enormous social power-images that embody and reflect the people's collective value-system. And the gratitude of the citizenry has been overwhelming.

The intensity of this popular admiration and respect is a remarkable phenomenon in itself. Neiman is not only the best known artist in America (with the possible exception of Andy Wyeth who also received very little attention from major critics until recently). He also is the first American painter to have risen from poverty to become a multi-millionaire.

His many TV appearances, (especially his painting of Olympic events live as they happened), in addition to his 25 years of regular monthly contributions to Playboy, has made his name a household word from coast to coast, and all around the world. And all this happened without much help from art museums or art magazines. Neiman is a truly popular phenomenon - a grass-roots phenomenon - a Popular Hero with as much fan mail as a Hollywood Super Star.

The American people have always loved the art of the concrete, or what E. P. Richardson calls "the poetry of fact Neiman has been able to give this to the American people, just those concrete qualities for which they have been thirsting for many years. As Andy Warhol said (in effect) when he painted his satirical images of Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes in the early 60s, "beautiful colors and beautiful brushwork are not enough!"

They are certainly enough for some people, but not enough for most people. As noted in the Introduction, it has been estimated that only about 1% of the American people are able to appreciate non-figurative painting. These are people who see the world very differently from most people. They look at the world, and at art, from an extremely high level of philosophical abstraction.

The vast majority of Americans have absolutely no interest in non-figurative abstractions, no matter how "beautiful" they might be. The basic psychosocial fact at work here is that if a work of art does not have a figure in it, the world at large is psychologically unable to relate to it. A world full of people is what most people see when they look. As Neiman expresses it, "the human eye is universal." They want to see images of the world that correspond with the way their eye actually perceives the world, with the sky up and the earth down and most of us in between.

And this Neiman (quite magically) is able to provide. He is so concrete in his precision that one is able to tell just about what temperature it is, how much smoke is in the room, and how much salt is in the air, whether at ring-side, on an Olympic ski-slope, or the sunlit beach of Cannes.

As a committed artist-of-the-people, Neiman has used a wide range of media in order to reach as many people as possible. In addition to painting and sculpture, he has worked with both traditional and contemporary media. His experience includes books, magazines, TV, and computer graphics, as well as several kinds of techniques that range from etchings and monotypes, to lithographs and silkscreen prints. The serigraphs are organic extensions of his paintings. They have the same look and feel. Similarly, his etchings are natural extensions of his draftsmanship, and include some of the best work he has done in any media.

This catalogue is dedicated to his accomplishment as a graphic artist. It is a fitting way to begin to record his life's work, since it is by means of his serigraphs that he has been able to offer tangible works of art to the greatest number of people. During the 1970s, Neiman executed over 170 limited editions of serigraphs with an average of 300 prints in each edition. That means that over 50,000 original works of art have been made available to his avid audience.

As the collective eye of the modern art establishment begins to re-focus on realism, it is difficult to overlook Neiman's achievement. And recently, some highly respected critics and artists have begun to take a second look at his work - work that is now in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Baltimore Museum of Fine Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Minnesota Museum of Art, the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, and the Hermitage in Leningrad.

During all those years when anyone who painted figures was viewed with suspicion by the modern art establishment, Neiman went on only doing his own thing. He was confident of his direction, and supported by enormous public approval. While none of the critics were looking, this pop artist/action painter was able to single-handedly bridge that giant gulf which separated the general public from the most advanced stylistic developments of the 20th century.

The sociological fact is that Neiman did what no other American artist was able to do. He made the profound stylistic innovations of Action Painting available to the general public by providing the psychological bridge of the human image grounded in everyday reality. This is not to overlook the important contributions of other American painters who also were experimenting with the synthesis of Abstract Expressionism and figure painting in the 1950s and 60s, such as Larry Rivers, and the San Francisco School of Park, Bischoff, Oliveira, and Diebenkorn. But the point I am making is quite simply that their work was not able to reach out and touch the hearts of the general public, and Neiman's work does.

The people Neiman reaches are the people he set out to serve in the first place - the General Public of the Big City. By doing exactly what he set out to do, he has helped to re-invigorate figure painting in particular, and Social Realism in general at a time when both were in danger of dying.

Social Realism is coming back to life again. This is a healthy sign. The making and appreciating of the art of our own time is an important way of coming to understand the whole of what it means to be a human being. A society that feels cut off, alienated from its leading artists, is not a healthy society. But Neiman has begun to help society to heal itself by putting art back into the life of the people.

F. Lanier Graham
San Francisco, March, 1980