Words: Bud Schmeling

Image Courtesy of the LeRoy Neiman Foundation

There is a group photo taken in 1985 at a New York restaurant called Mr. Chow’s, a shot arranged by Eric Goode, then the owner of the legendary downtown club, Area. It features pretty much every NYC art-scene heavy hitter working at the time: Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente. And there in the back row, raising a champagne glass, is LeRoy Neiman. According to the musician John Lurie (also featured in the photo), Neiman “had no idea what he was doing there.” The mustachioed bon vivant was almost as famous as Warhol, but had none of the art-world credibility. Yet there he was, among the downtown weirdos of the ’80s avant-garde. LeRoy Neiman was everywhere.

Mainstream America knows Neiman for his splashy and colorful oil paintings of famous athletes, all captured in his loose, kinetic style. He contributed to general-interest publications like Time and Playboy, as well as commercial outlets like Burger King and Wheaties. The world’s first, and maybe last, official sports illustrator, Neiman was present at virtually every major sporting event during the latter part of the 20th century, feverishly sketching away at Super Bowls, Kentucky Derbys, Olympics, World Cups, World Series, Grand Prix races, Wimbledons, and countless other championship games and title bouts. (It's hard to imagine today, but Neiman was shown on live TV, painting watercolors during the Olympic Games throughout the '70s and '80s.) His work appeared on tickets, programs, commemorative posters, and adorns the walls of the baseball, football, and boxing halls of fame. As Don King memorably said, "LeRoy could do more with a paintbrush than a monkey could do with a peanut."

Could critics and rivals have been jealous of his financial and commercial success? Were the affectations of the cloak-wearing, stogie-smoking dandy too indigestible? Or maybe it was that the rich and famous people who Neiman was drawn to as subjects were never explored as anything beyond rich and famous. Whatever might have motivated the opprobrium, Neiman was never bothered by the fine-art world’s cold shoulder. "Early on I'd found myself on the wrong side of the art scene, but, being born on the wrong side of tracks, that was just fine with me," he wrote in his 2012 memoir, All Told. "...I'd rather be a folk hero to 40 million Playboy readers, any day, than an icon among the airless art elite."

From a very early age, Neiman (born Runquist, adopting the surname of his stepfather after his dad abandoned the family when LeRoy was a small boy) recognized and cultivated his talent, intoxicated with the effect it had on people and the opportunities it brought him. After serving in WWII, Neiman received his education through the GI Bill, attending, and then teaching at, the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago. Around that time he began to develop his signature style—he happened upon a bounty of discarded house paint, and discovered that through rapid application, the overflowing paint "simulates movement." He soon had the ridiculously good fortune to meet an ambitious copywriter—by the name of Hugh Hefner—who was about to launch one of the most culturally influential publications of the century. And when in 1954, Hefner decided that Playboy's jokes page needed some visual assistance, Neiman came up with the Femlin, an ink sketching of a seductive siren in thigh-high stockings who would appear in every issue for the next 50 years. A few years later came the recurring column "Man at His Leisure," with Neiman playing the part of globetrotting gadfly, sending back illustrated dispatches from the nude beaches, casinos, and discotheques of swinging-’60s Europe. In All Told, Neiman reflected, "My whole career has basically been built on taking man-at-his-leisure seriously!"