Prints of Power
A Socialogical Study of the Artist LeRoy Neiman and 1,000 Neiman Collectors

By: David Halle and Louise Mirrer
Reprinted from The Prints of LeRoy Neiman, Volume I

Part Three: Conclusion

Some of the best historians of the Impressionist movement have stressed the importance of suburbanization and the new forms of leisure that accompanied it. They point, for example, to new attitudes towards nature and the countryside. No longer are these spaces seen as productive, but as an escape from work, an arena of leisure for the new middle classes. As Herbert has recently written:

Traditional uses of water and riverbank gave way to rowing, sailing, swimming, promenading, and dining at Bougival, Chatou, and Argenteuil, those favored impressionist subjects. Entrepreneurs of entertainment and real estate bought out fishermen and farmers, or cut up former aristocratic estates into lots for suburban villas.

Yet main currents in post-Impressionist art - above all, versions of abstract art - moved away from depicting contemporary leisure. Even as the pace of suburbanization and the growth of new leisure forms for the middle class and the well-to-do working class accelerated, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art lost interest in these topics. Neiman understood that abstract art left a void amongst twentieth-century audiences insofar as it made no effort to reflect the leisure aspirations and activities of the well-to-do middle classes after World War II.

One way of understanding Neiman's appeal across a broad range of social classes is to see his work as a depiction of an idealized version of society - a society in which everything runs smoothly. This idealization of the world is a deliberate strategy, for the artist himself says of his painting, "I seriously weigh the public presence of a person - the surface façade. I am less concerned with how people look when they wake up or how they act at home."

This understanding of Neiman's appeal is born out in this study by respondents who repeatedly remarked that Neiman's paintings were expressive of places they would like to be, or that they represented people whose shoes they would like to be in. The remarks of these respondents could perhaps be interpreted to suggest that Neiman's audience likes the smoothly functioning occupational hierarchy his work portrays - a world where subordinates are willing and eager to play their role (and are in fact willing and eager subordinates). Neiman's waiters in his restaurant scenes are eager to serve the restaurant's wealthy clientele; the officials in his sporting scenes are keen to keep up with the athletes. Furthermore, Neiman's leisure scenes are not just depictions leisure, but of a leisure of privilege and hierarchy. His restaurant scenes are not simply depictions of people sitting down to a meal, but of being waited on. In his spectacles, the spectators are having a benefit put on for them. (In Regents Park, for example, the park is for the spectators, for their benefit alone.) The rich can thus see themselves as enjoying the fruits of their leisure, while the not-so-rich can imagine themselves in their places.

Indeed, Neiman's work is very supportive of the established social order and lacks any hint of social criticism. His idealized world does not respond to social problems or needs, nor does it suggest an alternative social order. Neiman justifies this noncritical idealization, saying, for instance, that the workers he depicts in his paintings "shape up to the lifestyles of those they serve" and that he depicts officials, along with athletes in sporting event scenes, to show that they move with the same agility as the athletes. Moreover, he comments, "It's the fans in the stands, the owners, the sportswriters and the announcers that help make the scenes so exciting and interesting." Clearly, however, this is still a selective version of society.

There is another central reason why Neiman's work appeals to the less privileged as well as to the well-to-do middle and upper classes. His art resonates with the experience of the spectacles he depicts as presented on television to a wide audience. Neiman, who is closely in touch with his public, meeting them at gallery openings of his work, in restaurants, on elevators, at airports, etc., affirms that his popularity has to do with the interaction - indeed, the integration - of two different systems of perception he must achieve in his painting. For he has to represent not only the spectacle as seen by those who were there, but the spectacle as viewed by the far larger audience on television. If his depictions stray too far from the way they are seen on television, his work is likely to be criticized as 'unrealistic" - as failing to capture the actual feel and look of the spectacle.

The viewing of Neiman's art is thus a preconditioned activity, structured by television. At the level of painting, perception is, for the viewer, a confirming, authenticating act. For the works are inevitably judged in light of viewers' own image of events. It is no coincidence that Neiman's popularity soared after he appeared on ABC television during the 1976 Olympics painting the same athletes and events that the viewers were watching.

This study also shows that Neiman's broad popularity has to do with the placing of his subject matter firmly in the public sphere. Unlike the Impressionists, Neiman avoids depicting domestic scenes. His subject matter is that central component of modern leisure which is dominated by the overt competition of competitive sports and the celebration of power and victory. This subject matter is a metaphor for the "masculine" world of the modern large and small corporation, which accounts for the fact that, so unusual in the world of art buying, men constitute a strikingly large percentage of Neiman purchasers. (Women, of course, are now part of the managerial and executive sector of that world, but their success, too, depends on striving for victory and power.)

The central attraction of Neiman's idealized scenes is that he has continued and updated the early Impressionists' breakthrough - the depiction of contemporary leisure. This study shows that Neiman's popularity derives from his ability to glorify such central values as competition, success and power - to depict hierarchial social order which celebrates the successful - and to portray a world of modern leisure.

Thus, it is in the work of the broadly popular artist, LeRoy Nieman, that one may search for the expression of central social values and ideals of American society.

David Halle is a sociologist born in England. He has a B.A. from Oxford University and a Ph D in sociology from Columbia University. He is presently Associate Professor in the Departments of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and at the University of California at Los Angeles. His most recent book was America's Working Man (published by University of Chicago Press) He directed this study through the Center for American Culture Studies at Columbia University.

Louise Mirrer writes on literature and literary theory. She is a graduate of the Universities of Pennsylvania and Cambridge and has a Ph D from Stanford University. She is presently Associate professor in the Humanities Division of Fordham University and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles.