'Neimanland'

By: Jan Avgikos
Reprinted from The Prints of LeRoy Neiman, Volume III

Neiman in his studio (Photo: Gary Suson)

What does it mean to be the most well-known and successful artist in America - and on top of that, the "best loved," too - and just how many times do you have to die and go to heaven before you get to feel what that's like?

From what I observed one afternoon early in July as I walked with LeRoy Neiman and his assistant, Lynn Quayle, from the Hotel des Artistes to lunch at Tavern on the Green (all of a block or so) - it's not that much of a big deal. Serendipity must have been working overtime: his adoring public was everywhere. A guy on a bicycle who recognized Neiman walking down the street happened to be part of a television crew from Channel 5 in St. Paul (Neiman's hometown) and asked for, and got, an impromptu interview (as well as a promised preview of a new painting of Minnesota's governor, Jesse Ventura). The waiters, polite but barely contained in their affection for the artist, were each eager with personal stories to relate. "Do you remember your former driver? He's my brother-in-law and he once gave me one of your signed posters and I have it in my living room." They shake hands, the waiters beaming with pride to meet and speak with such a great and famous artist. In his paint-splattered outfit, Neiman looked the part, and rather dashingly so. Others in the crowd, having waited their turn, respectfully approached him and asked to shake his hand, testifying to the power of his art. "I'm so inspired by your paintings! The way you show Nature is so true!" a young student exclaims. The artist is very gracious, and a gifted conversationalist. If I hadn't known it before, I was in the presence of a genuine celebrity.

Since when does something like that happen? An artist accorded the status of a superstar by the general public? In our culture? There are those rare, rapturous moments when the presence of a "genius" artist can ignite an audience. I saw it happen once between Jasper Johns and a crowd at the opening of his 1998 retrospective at MOMA. But that was a very select art audience. Chances are, great as he is, even Jasper Johns wouldn't be recognized at the corner of 67th Street and Central Park West on any given afternoon. An artist who's so well-known by the general public that he's a celebrity? I don't think I've ever seen anything like it before. On the other hand, who doesn't have some kind of memory or story to tell about LeRoy Neiman and his art.

Blue Hockey, 1972

The reasons for Neiman's fame and renown are not insignificant. When all is said and done, it's likely that he has done more to shape popular culture than any other artist of the 20th century. But with such sweeping accolades we're way ahead of the art historical record, which has yet to properly credit Neiman for his accomplishments. From the beginning of his career in the mid-1950s, Neiman' s art has reflected an extraordinary hyper-awareness of itself in relation to the media and mass culture. That alone qualifies him for much - deserved recognition as the visionary that he is. At the same time that his art valorizes cultural spectacles, Neiman has always sought to cultivate the most personal sorts of experiences as the basis of viewers' engagement with his painting.

In the late 1950s and into the 1960s, Neiman pioneered a means to transform painting into a spectator sport. He also created a public artistic persona - an artist-performer-media celebrity - who functioned as the extremely charming and talented producer of an art that was as socially engaged as it was visually engaging. He became an icon or role model that symbolized a "new order of masculinity" and that pointed distinctly toward a future "global" society. What Neiman illustrates in his art is an endless, glittering spectacle of wealth and privilege. He visualizes a cosmology that is as utopian in its embrace of pleasure as it is progressive in its 1960s-flavored advocacy of art for the masses. Far from being dumbed down for "general audience consumption," Neiman's art enables conditions of spectatorship in which the viewer's "lived experience" of art serves as the grounds of art's legitimacy. Whether the art vehicle is an oil painting on canvas, or live "computer art" on network TV, or free posters at Burger King - Neiman doesn't discriminate - the viewer determines the validity of the art according to his or her own personal experience. Neiman shows us his willingness to conceive of art as fluid fields of experience rather than a series of static objects. He shows us something else, as well: he makes public the usually private moments of the activity of making art. Thus, he demystifies the process even while monumentalizing the creative act.

Superbowl XXVIII (Photo: Lynn Quayle)

Neiman was also the first artist - and so far, only artist - to successfully appropriate mass media. What Neiman figured out about creating art on an unprecedented monumental scale is that in order to be effective it must convey a sense of intimacy. Way back in the late 1960s when early video art was grappling with the implications of portability and videotape, Neiman was on a roll, appearing regularly on television with the New York Jets football team as their official "artist-in-residence from the bench." In 1972, he performed sketching live at the Munich Olympic Games in front of network cameras while tens of millions of viewers looked on and dug it! In 1976, during network coverage of the Montreal Olympics, he produced an oil mural on camera and discussed the painting with visitors (sports announcers, athletes, cameramen) who dropped by his "television studio." In 1978, he created the first live computer art on television at the New Orleans Superbowl, an experience he described as "painting blind" before an audience of millions. Neiman's art extends far beyond the traditional boundaries of what's acceptable as artistic practice. And yet, a climate of reception exists at the end of this century that suggests the art establishment might well be ready to learn from his example.

First and foremost, Neiman is a painter, part Social Realist, part Action Painter, with a penchant for flamboyant, symbolic color and dynamic figure-ground relations, which he learned studying European art. Academically trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, influenced by the Ashcan School and Abstract Expressionism alike, Neiman was on a respectable "Chicago Artist" career track in the early 1950s: teaching, entering competitions, winning prizes for his paintings of urban life and nightlife, sporting and entertainment events. He was struggling to develop a mature style, which was greatly abetted by his discovery of Jackson Pollock's work, especially his use of enamel house paint. He also moonlighted doing advertising work for the Carson Pirie Scott department store chain, which is where he met Hugh Hefner, a young copywriter and cartoonist who had an idea for a new kind of magazine he wanted to publish.

From its very humble beginnings in 1954, Playboy became a driving force in the cultural and sexual revolution that grew out of the 1950s - the decade that proclaimed progress as its most important product, and exploded in the 1960s. It ushered in attitudes that were new, modern, and stunningly utopian. "The Playboy Philosophy," Hefner's attempt to spell out the magazine's guiding principles, was eventually published as a 25-part installment series that ran from December, 1962 to May, 1966. It reads exactly like the manifesto that it is, championing the importance of individual and civil rights, celebrating cultural difference and diversity, and valorizing the pursuit of pleasure:

No conflict exists between the pleasure a Modern American finds in material things and his struggle to discover a new scientific truth, or evolve a new philosophy, or create a work of art. The good life, the full life, encompasses all of these - and all of them satisfy and spur a man on to do more, see more, know more, experience more, accomplish more. This is the real meaning, the purpose, the point of life itself: the continuing, upward striving and search for the ultimate truth and beauty - the measure of which is in the eye of the beholder.

(Photo: John Lair)

Years before its publication, Hefner and Neiman were both separately envisioning a new social order similar to the one described in The Playboy Philosophy. Naturally, when Hefner launched Playboy in 1954, Neiman became "the official Playboy artist." Hanging out in Neiman's basement studio, drinking beer and watching the Friday night fights, eating hamburgers at Banquet on a Bun on the corner, the two of them talked and dreamed and schemed.

Two important concepts grew out of the collaborative process between Hefner and Neiman. One was "Our Guy", an idealized "man of the world" persona dreamed up by the two of them as a model of the sort of enlightened, liberated individual who stood at the epicenter of the reasonable, progressive and pleasure-oriented cosmology they envisioned. The other was "Femlin," named as a hybrid of feminine and gremlin. "That's my girl," as Neiman refers to her, the cartoon character he's drawn for 45 years and that has appeared in every issue of the magazine (a different activity every month) since her "birth" in August, 1955. He and "Hef" were looking for something "lively and kicky," as Neiman puts it, "because we thought we were pretty lively and kicky at the time." Femlin, designed to represent the free-spirited girl-next-door, is 100% voluptuous and wholesome, and as Neiman is quick to point out, she's always au courant, whether she's sporting dreadlocks this month or doing a little "in-line skating" next month. "She's done everything," he says, "and still she is influenced by the world-at-large and reflects the changing times. She's very real."

Paris, 1993 (Photo: Lynn Quayle)

Always in a celebratory mood and incredibly animated (she must get that from the "gremlin" side), she radiates positive energy and charm. It's clear she is not a Muse or a plaything, but a woman of the world with her passport open and ready to go. She's an athlete and an avid sports fan, a patriot, and a "funster," too. Independent and self-determined, with the freedom to do everything that men do and the privilege to possess a joyous libido, she was one of the first visual icons of liberated femininity. She's way ahead of the game compared to her contemporary, Barbie, another icon, but one who's frozen in place in whatever persona goes with her outfit.

By the late 1950s, Playboy was credited with having launched a lifestyle revolution. With the purchase of the first Playboy Mansion, the opening of the first Playboy Club, and the television debut of Playboy's Penthouse, it was generally recognized that Hefner had become "Mr. Playboy" and that his fantasies had become strikingly "real." While Hef's fantasies were realized by staying at home and wearing pajamas around the Playboy Mansion, Neiman developed a multi-faceted public persona as a man of action, a cultural ambassador, and a vvirtuoso artist-performer who roamed the world on behalf of the magazine in pursuit of the good life. Beginning in 1958, and regularly for the next 15 years, Neiman contributed his impressions from cultural fronts all over the world in a feature entitled "Man at His Leisure." In paintings, drawings, and written commentaries, Neiman recorded his adventures living the high life as one of the "beautiful people." He was seemingly everywhere at once, ringside here, backstage there, schmoozing with the winners, the world-famous, the trend-setters, and his fellow globetrotters. Neiman became a permanent fixture on the circuit of the glitterrazzi. He became the shining embodiment of Our Guy, the epitome of the Playboy Man. That's what impressive numbers of photographs would have us believe, and perhaps it is true. And that persona, a carefully constructed image, became intrinsic to his success.

Checking color on a serigraph, 1978

Our Guy was ideal and subversive at the same time. By the looks of it, he wasn't a family man, nor was he the marrying kind. The world Neiman describes in his paintings and drawings - (though some historians relate it to that of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism) - does not appear to be terribly sympathetic to what might be termed "family values." There aren't any images of children, for example, or scenes of mothers and babies and such. Although he repeatedly pays homage to workers, there are no indigent or downtrodden types. Rather, this world - Neimanland - is wholly ideal and Our Guy, in it, is young and virile, sophisticated and sexy, brilliant, creative, connected, powerful, experienced and virtually omnipotent. And there are pictures to prove that, too. The emphasis on Our Guy as a man of action complements Femlin, his alter-ego, who is ready to break ties with the past. Not only is she the wholesome girl-next-door, she approves of sex, and makes it seem so healthy, upbeat and fun! Both characters - Femlin and Our Guy - created by Neiman, depart from tradition and are keyed to the motif of change: she, in her kinetic energy and progressive attitudes; he, in his fluency, non-stop energy and pioneering spirit.

No sooner had Neiman begun to produce "Man at His Leisure" than he went on assignment fulltime, offering an intimate, behind-the-scenes look into the most elite and famous spots and events in the world. It was a far cry from his humble roots and upbringing next to the black neighborhood in St. Paul, where the only people in town who were poorer than he was lived. Neiman's paintings celebrate an unending spectacle of privilege and success, and his written commentaries, which often accompany the reproduction of his work in magazines and books, make it clear that Neiman was seduced by star culture. More precisely, the voice or persona that speaks and writes publicly in "Man at His Leisure" is the one who waxes euphoric over the splendid world that opened to him.

With Frank Sinatra, on the set of "Tony Rome," 1967

In 1960, Neiman took an "art trip" to Europe for Playboy for six months, using as "field studios" such grand hotels as Claridge's and the Dorchester in London, Hotel George V in Paris, the Royal Danielli in Venice, the Palace in Madrid, Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, the Carlton in Cannes, the Excelsior in Rome. In England, he covered the Grand National Steeplechase at Aintree; the Cambridge-Oxford Boat Race; Epsom Derby and Ascot Race Meet. In Paris, it was Maxim's and the Tour d'Argent restaurants, Chez Regine, backstage at the Lido and Folies Bergere, polo at Bagatelle, the Steeplechase at Auteuil, racing at Chantilly. In southern France, Las Baux restaurant, the Cannes Film Festival. On to the Fiesta de San Isidro bullfights in Madrid, the Grand Prix in Monaco, and Venice. He set up a studio in the Normandy Hotel at Deauville and sketched the social season in full social swing - the casino, polo, racing, boating, golf, tennis, yearling sales, Indian maharajahs, Italian princes, German barons, French counts, English lords, American industrialists, international beauties. The list goes on, and was published in 1974 in a chronology in Neiman's first book, Art and Lifestyle. Throughout the 1960s Neiman "made the scene" with a vengeance. He stayed in London for three months and sketched "personalities": the Beatles, David Frost, Woody Allen, Robert Morley, Prince Merid Beyene of Ethiopia. Back in New York, he sketched Leonard Bernstein at Philharmonic Hall. On many occasions he drew and painted his friend, Muhammad Ali, and the two even collaborated on a "prediction painting" for the Zora-Folley fight after a morning run around the reservoir in Central Park. He spent six weeks with Frank Sinatra at the Fountainebleau in Miami on the "Tony Rome" set. He joined Fellini on the set of "8 1/2"and sketched Gina Lollabrigida on the Cinecittá movie sets in Rome. He spent three days in the Ford pits at the LeMans 24-hour endurance auto race in France. He revisited Rome for a look at its night life, painted the Piazza del Popolo and then the Via Veneto from the roof of the Hotel Flora, held an exhibition in Florence and returned once again to Venice. He drove to Yugoslavia and lived as a nudist to cover a nudist colony scene from the Istrian peninsula along the Dalmatian Islands to Dubrovnik and Sveti Stefan. He sketched the bullfights at Plaza Monumental in Barcelona on the way to Pamplona to cover the Fiesta de San Fermin, and topped off his Pamplona stay by actually running with the bulls.

Red Square, 1977

He traveled with the New York Jets for an entire football season, sketching from the bench as their official artist. He flew off on a painting trip to the Soviet Union to paint in "Red Square," to sketch at the Bolshoi Opera and Ballet, and at the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad. Feeling "caught up in ballet" he returned to New York and sketched Rudolf Nureyev at Lincoln Center. He also had a social conscience and found time in his busy schedule to start teaching art classes for the Atlanta Youth Council in the Atlanta Poverty Program, commuting monthly to Georgia. He took off on a trip to Morocco via Lisbon, sketching and painting his way through Casablanca, Rabat, Agadir and Tangiers, including the belly dancers of Katoubia Palace. In 1970 he joined Hef and some of Hef's friends on the "Big Black Bunny Jet" for a trip to Europe and Africa, in the course of which they visited London, Marbella, Khartoum, Nairobi, Kenya (on safari), Rome, Venice, Munich, Paris, Rabat, and cruised the Greek Islands.

Neiman's wanderlust, and his apparent commitment to give 110% in living up to the job description of "Playboy Artist of the Western World", while extravagant by any standard, is much more in keeping with travel trends of the late 1990s than the late 1950s and 1960s. In general, people did not travel so much then, as they do today. Besides, the world was much bigger thirty or forty years ago, before 24-hour ATM's, and ten flights a day to London, and cell phones spilling out of shirt pockets, and laptops folded into carry-ons, and an endless array of gadgets that put us in touch instantly. The world-view sustained in "Man at His Leisure," and throughout Neiman's prodigious output as an artist, is one that shows "global consciousness" as ultra-hip and seductive. Based on the activities of an idealized, masculine persona who just happened to have a real life counterpart in Neiman as a one-of-a-kind virtuoso artist, showman, and jetsetter, we are given, among other things, a compelling portrait of neutral global politics. Our Guy cuts back and forth across the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War, his "good will" gestures of cultural exchange accomplished in the production of visual art. Neiman's globetrotting performances as a kind of larger-than-life ambassador for the arts call into play the vision of an extended, progressive, global community as the future-world to which Our Guy aspires to belong.

President's Birthday Party, 1989

There's something else about Our Guy, as realized by Neiman. The persona he created is one that is not just at home in the world but knows the world, and itself, intimately. Indeed, intimacy is typically the only mode of address Neiman employs. What's so incredible about his public persona as an artist-celebrity - and this is part of the aura of intimacy of the work - is that he knows, or gets to know, just about all the subjects he draws and paints, many of whom are notables among the movers and shakers of the last half of the century. Similarly, the spectacles he renders in his art, such as "The President's Birthday Party." Yes, he was there for that event at Madison Square Garden. "You notice that Jackie is not in the picture," he points out to me. I ascertain that he was present for virtually all of the "high-note" cultural spectacles he depicts. (His paintings of Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo are obvious exceptions.) In Neiman's art, it all happens live, and it all represents lived experience, and that's one of the primary means by which the art puts in its claim to being real. Furthermore, when he presents us with a picture of anything as represented "live" by the artist, it's certain that part of what's on display is a testament to the sanctity of the individual.

Whether in Tangiers or Timbuktu or Tin-Pan Alley, we are given the entire, new lifestyle and rippling displays of talent. He represents "the new masculinity," as much a sketch of 21st century man as a representation of a media stereotype. Speaking on the subject of masculinity some 35 years after the creation of his wildly successful public persona as the artist-performer-celebrity, Neiman observed in the March, 1985 issue of "Palm Springs Life," "the new wave of male has it much better today, lots more freedom to grow. A man does not have to prove his masculinity any more than a woman has to stay at home. All he has to do is be aware of himself."

Color Proofing a Serigraph, 1990

Identities of the sort manufactured and performed by Neiman - the Playboy Man, the virtuoso artist -performer, the celebrity-showman, or (rolling the attributes up together) the Playboy Artist of the Western World - are complex ones to create and maintain. However we refer to him, a wealth of photographs exist documenting his public "appearances." On one hand, like a series of stills depicting the life of an exemplary man of action and a gentleman, the photographs give the impression that all of Neiman's creative time and effort is spent in pursuit of the good life. On the other hand, they reveal being "in character" as the artist-performer-celebrity as largely a media-driven process. Many documentary and souvenir-type shots taken over the course of decades show Neiman being photographed, videotaped, or filmed while he sketches or paints. Whatever fabulous subject he apprehends and renders as his art, he too is literally caught in the act of creation by the camera, which always seems to be there, dutifully recording Our Guy as he hangs out and hobnobs with the rich and famous. It also shows him literally at work, because that is also part of what his making art in the lap of luxury represents. Always figuring prominently in these "purchased entertainment scenes," as Neiman refers to them, are other sorts of workers, too - the wait staff, barmen, coat checkers, drivers, and legions of others - whom he regards as the "backbone of every high-powered social occasion, soirée, or event."

Las Vegas, 1988

In Neimanland, no concept of work is far from a "we just won the Lotto" dream of success and leisure. That's evident in his paintings but also in the celebrity-style snapshots that supply black and white evidence of Neiman's fabulous playboy lifestyle and equally enviable social calendar. They also show him as agile as a Las Vegas-style performer, a showman conquering the world in one camera-worthy outfit or embrace after the next, who's always "on." When it's not snapping up pictures for posterity of the star-studded good life, the camera dutifully records Neiman's visible zeal and dedication to paint the world and to be almost continually photographed while doing it. What the photographs prove, beyond doubt, is that for Neiman, the showmansup and bravura that surround the act of making a mark as significant as the marks that are made.

There's something else about the pairing of photography and the performance of painting - sandwiched around the constant rounds of meeting and greeting personalities and drawing or painting their portraits - that is so characteristic of Neiman's work. No matter the time, place, or occasion, he is johnny-on-the-spot with his pads and pens and pencils, and absolutely athletic in the lengths to which he will go for the right perspective, or the best angle of vision. Curiously, a large part of what is presented in these instances is the sheer anachronism of the act of rendering by hand, like a flashback to earlier times, to Daumier's time, perhaps, or to the Ashcan School, particularly when the artist is surrounded by so much reproductive technology. But that is precisely the point. Photographic images of Neiman show him repeatedly performing the role of artist for the camera, rendering by hand, just as he does for his public. It continues to be the case today. Photographs are still produced featuring the artist socializing with the mega-personalities of our times at glamorous events in so many different countries, and on so many different continents, that he appears to be a veritable James Bond, except he isn't a glamorous spy. He is a glamorous artist, an artist who turned painting into a spectator sport and performed it with such virtuosity and panache that both he and his art became a sensation.

With Alfred Frankenstein, 1979 (Photo: Donna D. Ferrato)

The depictions of those who belong to "the living Hall of Fame" of the 20th Century, as well as to the big cultural and sporting spectacles to which Neiman always has been attracted, are synonymous with "media culture." Increasingly, the sorts of events he attends as an artist - the big games, the fights, the championships, the entertainment spectacles - are produced specifically for media consumption. As an artist, Neiman lives at the center of a world of privilege and high stakes competition. That's the thrill he delivers, vicariously, to his viewers. Given his subject, it's only fitting that Neiman would have found a way to greatly expand the sense of scale and monumentality in his work, a feat he accomplished with television. Neiman used to call himself a "street artist." Playboy gave him the kind of audience that street artists never get, and television amplified that exposure exponentially.

Color Proofing a Serigraph, 1990 (Photo: Steve Friedman)

Neiman credits two men as significant to his career development. One was Armand Hammer, who rose from New York's Lower East Side in a "rags to riches rampage" to become a multimillionaire who wielded formidable power. Before he became czar of Occidental Petroleum, Hammer was, among other things, the namesake of Hammer Galleries. Beginning in the early 1960s, he was Neiman's dealer. Hammer taught him about deals and "closure," as Neiman tells the story, and he bankrolled some of Neiman's projects. The other mentor in Neiman's career was Roone Arledge, a visionary who probably did more to shape television in the 1960s than any other individual. He was the first to turn sports into prime time entertainment with his ground-breaking "Wide, Wide World of Sports" for ABC-TV. It was Arledge who "discovered" Neiman's potential for television and who first put him before live cameras as an artist and commentator and all-around showman. With his good looks, flowing hair and handlebar mustache, and cool clothing that was his style at the time, Neiman truly looked the part.

Neiman was a pioneer in the creation and projection of "identity images," or stereotypes, in and through the media. In his own practice, whether in primary paintings and drawings or in documentary photographs and videos, time and again it's the "insider's view" that so often presents itself as a subject of his art. No matter the spectacle, we're right there, living and breathing the event. His style of action painting becomes symbolic of this immediacy.

Superbowl XXII (Photo: Ken Levine)

Neiman jump-started his career as a painter by marrying two opposites - Social Realism and Action Painting. He pushed painting into a style all his own; then, as an artist who performs the creative act for live audiences, he pushed painting again into performance. When television entered the frame of his art, Neiman transformed painting from a spectator sport into a grand spectacle. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Neiman appeared regularly on television as a network television artist-in-residence performer-commentator for the Olympics, World Series, Superbowls, Grand Slams, and Masters tournaments, for ABC Sports and for NBC Sports (at different times) the Fischer-Spassky world champion chess tournament at Reykjavik, the first "female-male" tennis match between Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs, and a host of other events that include the America's Cup yacht races, Ali fights, and cockfights (once). His affiliations were legion and he was much in demand as an acclaimed artist and a media personality. His most experimental work as a "mass media" artist involved the use of computerized technologies, in 1978, to extend painting into new dimensions. Neiman "painted" with an electronic pen, making marks and gestures on a device called an "AVA frame buffer" and utilized a computer program for a palette. The "paintings" he created could only be seen or received by him as feedback similar, perhaps, to the way a viewer might apprehend the development of the same painting. The effect of working blind," as he described it, suggests a blurring, however momentary, of the roles of producer and consumer in the aesthetic situation. From our perspective, almost a quarter of a century down the road, the experiment just screams "interactivity!"

It's not much of a conceptual leap to appreciate that Neiman ruptures the envelope of conventional art thinking by introducing the possibility of new kinds of technologies, audiences, situations, encounters, and interactions into the working vocabulary of artistic form. In addition to appearances on network television and the production of experimental computer art, Neiman's "media art" encompasses such forms as mass-produced give-away posters and cereal boxes. He works on a variety of surfaces, but what characterizes these, in particular, is that they qualify as free. Think about his project in the 1970s with Burger King, creating sports posters for limited mass production to be handed out free with hamburgers. Think about a series of his sports paintings that appeared on the front of Wheaties football "legends" cereal boxes a couple of years ago. On the back - you guessed it - a photograph of Neiman, at work at the canvas, rendering a portrait of Johnny Unitas, and a special offer that read: "This box may contain a winning certificate for a free, hand signed LeRoy Neiman poster."

Kentucky Derby, 1997 (Photo: Lynn Quayle)

Whether or not anyone (other than the artist) would still consider LeRoy Neiman to be a street artist, it's clear that throughout his career he has placed a priority on communication with as wide an audience as he could reach. There's always been a strong sense of Social Realism in Neiman's art. It's there, both as style and ideology, and it's remarkably apparent in his populist leanings. He brings art to the people. One of the things that's so great about that is if a general audience can "see" Neiman's paintings - and we know they do - they can also "see" Cezanne, Matisse, Kokoschka, Pollock and Tintoretto, because their styles figure into Neiman's own painterly style, which is informed by a wealth of art history. Is that what we demand in order to differentiate high art from other kinds of art? That art manifest a clear and recognizable pedigree through reference to the Canon? Neiman' s art performs well enough on that score, but there's more. What if, instead of doing traditional art history, we were to attempt to describe the artist's use of mass media art to create pockets of "group raves" and "cybernetic grooves" out there in viewer/receiver/producer land, the numbers and sizes of which are more or less incalculable at present, but which remain in the hearts and minds of people for decades - who knows, maybe forever? Clearly, that shuts the old art historical system down. The example of Neiman's art, at least for this historian, makes clear the necessity of reworking the what's, why's, when's, where's, and who's of how we configure contemporary history.

For decades, Neiman has been making art that is complex, interactive, reflexive, visual, visceral, and very lyrical. It is also an art that defeats that aspect of traditional art historical methodology which defines everything in terms of "movements." Neiman isn't and never has been part of any movement I can think of - unless we are willing to see him as a movement all by himself. And that's not hard to do at all.

Jan Avgikos
New York City, 1999