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Artists & Works
LeRoy Neiman
American (b.1928)
THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1976)
oil on board
36” x 48”

STYLE: POP ART,
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

 

LeRoy Neiman may be the most popular artist in the United States, although his work is not highly regarded by art critics. After painting portraits, murals, and stage sets throughout his adolescence and his career in the military during World War II, Neiman studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then taught there in the fifties. Neiman first became known as an illustrator for Playboy magazine in its early years. Neiman wrote and illustrated a column for Playboy for fifteen years. Neiman is most celebrated, however, for his illustrations of sporting events and atheletes, which became his focus in the sixties. Neiman developed a style of painting which captured the essence of fast-moving action. It is this style, as well as his use of bright, saturated color, that has made Neiman’s sports paintings so effective.

The French Connection has great significance for Western New York hockey fans as well as for Neiman fans; it depicts the teamwork of three Buffalo Sabres players of the seventies: Rene Robert, Gilbert Perreault, and Richard Martin. The painting is now on permanent display in the Dwyer Arena on the Niagara Univerity campus.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

“LeRoy Neiman,” from Current Biography, Wilson and Company, 1996
"Describing Neiman as ‘first and foremost a colorist,’ Malcolm Lein wrote, ‘His tones are vivid, jarring, and at times, gaudily biting; they explode in an effusion of reds, blues, pinks, greens, and yellows; they shimmer and dance across the surface plane, electrified bits of pure energy.’ ‘Extremely important in my painting is the use of the same color for both positive and negative purposes. . . ,’ Neiman explained in a letter to American Artist that appeared in an article by William Caxton Jr. in the April 1961 issue. ‘This is accomplished by deliberate selection of the adjacent colors, possibly a complement or an opaque if [the first color] is transparent, which permits the same [color] to be flat, fall back, or stand out, highlight, outline, and describe whatever is emotionally necessary for its intended function in the picture.”

Jan Avigos, Neimanland in The Prints of LeRoy Neiman, Knoedler, 2000
" 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!"