Neiman, who was also a longtime contributor to Playboy magazine, died Wednesday in New York, said his longtime publicist, Gail Parenteau. A cause was not disclosed.
The accessible works of art he painted depicted sports and other leisure activities with bold, distinctive strokes on a canvas that invariably brimmed with color.
He was so successful that as early as 1976 The Times called him "in market terms ... a bigger success than Rembrandt — or any other painter. He is the first sports artist of America. More significantly, Neiman is first by so far nobody knows who's second."
The pronouncement was made in a three-part series on sports art that highlighted Neiman's impressive sales figures. He had sold more than 40,000 paintings and prints — worth an estimated $30 million in 1976 — over the previous four years.
But his critics — and there were many — said Neiman's forays into the commercial world minimized him as a serious artist. He was both loved and disdained for the same reason: His splashy conceptions of athletes in action were mass-produced.
While he focused on major American sports, such as baseball and basketball, he also gained fame in a 1972 television broadcast for sketching chess players Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer competing against each other in Iceland.
Neiman's "reportage of history and the passing scene … revived an almost lost and time-honored art form," according to a 1972 exhibit catalog of the artist's Olympics sketches at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
For the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Neiman was appointed the official artist. He was affiliated with five Olympiads.
His career received an early boost from an unlikely source: Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who discovered the artist in 1953 when he was working as a fashion illustrator for a department store. Neiman was soon creating art for Playboy magazine, including the well-endowed nude that has graced the magazine's Party Jokes page since 1957.
It was the start of what he called "the good life" and inspiration for much of his future work. He regularly contributed to the magazine's "Man at His Leisure" feature, which took him to such places as the Grand National Steeplechase and Ascot in England and the Grand Prix auto race in Monaco.
"It's been fun. I've had a lucky life," Neiman told the Associated Press in 2008. "Art has made me pull the best out of myself."
He was born June 8, 1921, in St. Paul, Minn., to Charles Runquist, an unskilled laborer, and his wife, Lydia. After his father abandoned the family, he took a stepfather's surname.
In 1942, he joined the Army and saw two years of combat during World War II. He also served as a cook.
He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois.
His painting style came into being "very suddenly," he later said, and emerged after he experimented with discarded cans of enamel paint that allowed him to render fast-moving action with swift strokes.
After a stint in Paris, Neiman set up shop in New York and began exhibiting in galleries. As a portraitist, he painted such iconic figures as Frank Sinatra and Babe Ruth, managing to capture how the public saw them.
He worked in many media, producing thousands of etchings, lithographs and silk screen prints. Eventually, his art gravitated toward sports.
"For an artist, watching a [Joe] Namath throw a football or a Willie Mays hit a baseball is an experience far more overpowering than painting a beautiful woman or leading political figure," Neiman said in 1972.
With his trademark handlebar mustache and slicked-back hair, Neiman was instantly recognizable. At a New York Jets game in 1975, fans yelled, "Put LeRoy in," when the play wasn't going their way.
One face he repeatedly depicted was that of Muhammad Ali. Those paintings and sketches, representing 15 years of the fighter's life, are housed at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery at the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Ky. Neiman's works are in the permanent collections of many private and public museums.
His philanthropy included donating $6 million to Columbia University to create the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies. He also gave $3 million to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he once taught.
His studio was near Central Park in the home that he shared with Janet, his wife of 55 years. She survives him.
A workaholic who said he had no hobbies, Neiman produced large-scale works late in life, including a 160-foot-long sports mural that was hung in the Sports Museum of America, which opened in New York in 2008.
"What else am I good for?" he said in 2008. "I don't think about anything else."
Source: www.latimes.com
Picasso painting vandalized at Menil Collection could be saved - Los Angeles Times
The Menil Collection in Texas is attempting to save a painting by Pablo Picasso that was vandalized recently with spray paint. The incident, which was captured on video and posted to YouTube, involved a man using black spray paint to deface Picasso's 1932 "Woman in Red Armchair."
Soon after the incident, the Houston museum rushed the painting to its conservation lab where experts are attempting to save it, according to the Houston Chronicle. The vandal stenciled an image of a bull and the word "Conquista" on the painting.
The museum told the Associated Press that its chief conservator has been working on the painting since it was damaged on Wednesday. Police in Houston are investigating the incident, according to the AP.
CNN quoted a Menil Collection spokeswoman saying that "the prognosis is excellent" for the painting.
A YouTube video (warning: adult language) showing the act of vandalism lasts about 25 seconds and shows a figure dressed in dark clothes spray-painting the Picasso work and then walking away.
The Menil is one of the top art museums in the country and offers free admission to all visitors.
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Source: www.latimes.com
Painting of Picasso's pregnant lover sells for $13m - ninemsn
Pablo Picasso's 'Femme assise', which depicts the Spanish artist's lover Francoise Gilot while heavily pregnant with their daughter Paloma, sold for over $13 million at a London auction on Wednesday.
The Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale at Christie's realised 92,583,550 GBP ($145,541,340) in total with the 1949 Picasso work topping the public lots after going under the hammer for the equivalent of $13,176,621.
Gilot was aged 21 when she met Picasso, then 61, in a restaurant in the spring of 1943.
The couple never married but had two children together. Their son, Claude, was born in 1947 while Paloma was born in 1949.
The evening's most anticipated work, Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 1888 'Baigneuse', was sold privately before the auction.
'Les jours gigantesques' by Rene Magritte smashed pre-sale expectations after selling for $11,106,886, the second highest price for the artist at auction.
"There were particularly notable prices for Surrealist works, reflecting the current fervour for this field," Christie's International Director Jay Vincze said.
"These were led by Magritte's 'Les jours gigantesques' which sparked a fierce battle between 10 bidders and which sold for almost five times its high estimate," he added.
There were also artist records set for Italian painter and printmaker Giorgio Morandi and German painter Kurt Schwitters.
Source: finance.ninemsn.com.au
Joan Miro painting smashes auction record - BBC News
Joan Miro's 1927 work Peinture (Etoile Bleue) has sold for more than £23.5 million in London, setting a new auction record for the Spanish painter.
An anonymous telephone bidder saw off three rivals at the Sotheby's sale.
The abstract work has tripled in price since it was last sold in 2007 and fetched the highest price reached at a London auction so far this year.
The previous auction record for a Miro was £16.8m, set when his 1925 work Painting-Poem sold in February.
Peinture (Etoile Bleue) - which translates as Painting (Blue Star) - hails from Miro's 'dream paintings' cycle and had been expected to fetch no more than £15m.
According to Sotheby's Helena Newman, the high figure reflected the current "unprecedented demand" for the best of 20th Century art.
The second highest price at Tuesday's event was fetched by Pablo Picasso's Homme Assis, which sold for £6.2m.
A Henry Moore sculpture, Mother and Child With Apple, was one of the night's other star performers, raising well above its pre-sale forecast of £3.7m.
The auction was the first in a busy week for fine art sales in London, which continues on Wednesday at Christie's.
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
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