 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
So he genuinely respects the quiet little visual arts of everyone. And he paints what people look like when they cover up their private bodies with clothes and jewels and scents. The image of all this is what he goes for. This is a subtle point. At first it may seem difficult to grasp. But it is very easy to see visually. Many of his critics call him "superficial." There is nothing wrong with using a word like this, if that is what we really mean. There's room for confusion if the word is not used correctly. "Superficial" is a tricky word.
There are "superficial" things about Neiman's work. Some of his early serigraphs, for example, are thinly conceived and hastily executed. As I studied these early editions I wondered why the bodies are so thin, as if he were painting only the skins of these athletes instead of their whole bodies. Some of his portraits have some of the quality of caricature. Then he explained how he goes for both the actual look of people, and the image that is either self-projected or projected onto them by the general public. Neiman's work in general is specifically superficial in a very special sense. Neiman's iconography, his actual subject-matter, is the symbolic surface of things, in their relation with each other. His interpretation is, by turns, sympathetic and satirical, but usually his attitude is quite positive. Everyone has a certain look - a look that usually is quite carefully cultivated consciously or unconsciously. The "image" includes many things: how we cut our hair, how we dress, how we walk, and how our attitudes towards life have a way of carving themselves into the corners of our face. Groups of people also have images. Corporations have images. Nations have images. Our world is very much a world of images now-a-days. Image-building is a multi-billion dollar industry. Our national security depends on projecting a certain image. And so does the everyday psychological functioning of our individual personalities. Neiman is only concerned with the people part of all this. He could be called an "Environmental Artist", in a certain way. He paints the look of people and their places. Unlike the existential Andrew Wyeth, Neiman almost never paints people alone. He paints people being together in public places. People who hang out in bars tend to look one way. People who attend museum openings tend to look another way. One of the unique achievements of Neiman's mature work is that he has been able to capture just this - the actual look of everyday reality in motion. This extremely realistic image is pervaded by colors that symbolically evoke a feeling of the entire physical and psychological environment.
And it works. It does not always work equally well, but it works. In spite of his freely admitted unevenness, his compositions work to such a degree that the public response is seldom casual. Usually the response is passionately favorable or passionately unfavorable. It would be instructive to do a sociological survey of who is pro, who is con, and why. To those who do not like Neiman's work, it is vulgar subjects that are merely "illustrational" in concept, and grotesque in coloration. His fans, on the other hand, love his work so much that they fill their homes and offices with many examples. To his many ardent admirers Neiman captures both the look and the feel of the world as they see it working. This is what most people want art to be: as human as a story, as simply phrased as a poem by Robert Frost, as intense and colorful as urban life, and as visually moving as a movie. And this is what Neiman has devoted his life to doing - giving the people what they want by creating an art that is accessible to everyone. This moral position about what art should be became quite unfashionable during the spread of Abstract Expressionism, and did not resurface until Pop Art in the 1960s. Neiman was ahead of his time. From the point of view of subject matter, he was a pop artist before Pop Art popped. But the style he was developing in the 50s to convey popular imagery was something quite different from the "hard-edge" approach of the classical Pop Artists. He was committed to Action Painting as the best possible means of communicating the action of light, the action of people, the action of life.
|
