Sports Biblio Digest 7.22.18: LeRoy Neiman’s Sports Impressionism
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
In This Issue: The Hub Kid Bids Adieu in Color; Roger Angell on Baseball Films; David Feherty’s Tragicomedy; Cecil Healy; Summer Hoops; Soccer Fan Culture in D.C.; Farewell to a Sports Copy Desk
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Even in death, LeRoy Neiman couldn’t escape the ridicule about his sports and popular art that made him a wealthy man and as well-known as many of his athlete and celebrity subjects.
Not that Neiman, who was 91 when he died in 2012, was bothered by the criticism. With an inimitable persona that included a Salvador Dali-sh mustache, he eagerly indulged in a self-made aura that extended far beyond his canvases.
“I like being outrageous. I don’t actually do anything except be conspicuous. It keeps me revved up… My performance is part of my success.”
As prolific as he was popular, Neiman’s Impressionistic paintings of athletes covered the gamut, from the Olympics, to Muhammad Ali, to Joe Namath and a memorable 1968 Time magazine cover of Bobby Hull.
As his fame soared, the critics, initially piqued by his rise to fame as an illustrator in the early 1950s with Playboy, a then-new magazine, jabbed their blades even deeper.
Hugh Hefner may have given Neiman an opportunity, but the painter, who remained a “drawer” at heart, claimed he knew he was onto something novel just as the age of television dawned:
“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. Concentrating on sports has helped me, because I couldn’t refer back to past movements. There hasn’t been any sports art to speak of.. . . I’ve had the field pretty much to myself.”
But the full story of Neiman’s life tells a more complicated tale of a man not as obsessed with himself as some imagined. In his memoir “All Told,” published two weeks before his death, Neiman wrote of his poor upbringing in St. Paul, Minn., during the Depression. After serving in the U.S. Army in World War II, he received GI benefits and used them to go to art school.
Not just any art school: The Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught for a decade. Even as an art student, he insisted on painting his own way, "typically unrepentant and uncapitulating."
The established critics sneered at much of the pop art that was hitting the American scene in the 1950s and 1960s. Neiman, in a similar vein, was accused of being famous, not great, à la Andy Warhol.
Robert Hughes, in his notable collection “Nothing If Not Critical,” sniffed that Neiman was famous "because millions of people watch sports programs, read Playboy and will take any amount of glib ab-ex slather so long as it adorns a recognisable and pert pair of jugs."
Even observers in the sports world weren’t impressed. After Neiman’s 1974 book, “Art & Life Style,” Pat Jordan wrote in Sports Illustrated that the painter was a “carbon-paper Dali:”
“His personal flamboyance obscures deficiencies in his art. At best, he is only an adequate draftsman. His outrageous use of colors tends to divert viewers from the ambiguity of his line.”
In his 2012 book “Sports and American Art,” the acclaimed sports historian Allen Guttmann mentioned Neiman only in passing, calling his depictions of sports “unimaginative” and “uninteresting” but nevertheless they are “realistic enough for viewers to recognize the sport and abstract enough for them to feel that the artistic avant-garde hasn’t marched beyond their comprehension.”
What Neiman did with his wealth was to give much of it away. There are centers and schools named after him at UCLA and New York University, as well as his alma mater, and he donated his personal collection to the Smithsonian’s archives of American art.
Neiman wrote or contributed to more than a dozen books, and his work has been exhibited in dozens of galleries and museums.
That didn’t deter critics’ obituaries, including Ken Johnson in The New York Times, who wrote that Neiman enjoyed fame without a legacy:
“Mr. Neiman was the archetypal hack, his immense popularity explicable only by his ambitiously opportunistic personality and his position as Hugh Hefner’s court artist, which gave him monthly visibility to millions in the pages of Playboy. With his ever-present cigar and enormous mustache, he was a cliché of the bon vivant and a bad artist in every way.”
The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl was about as charitable as it got from the high-brow ranks:
“Neiman did something that was there to be done. Had he not existed, someone else would have served the need, but not conceivably as well. Moreover, he was nice man who worked hard and, while gawkily approximating a dandyish mien, never succumbed to pretension.”
The latter quality is what those friendly with Neiman espoused in their remembrances. His exclusion from the elites was an asset:
“Neiman, in other words, was not of the art world. We looked at him as a moneymaking illustrator. He knew it. And he didn't seem to care.”
Carol Becker, the former dean of faculty at the Art Institute of Chicago, said Neiman was good-hearted and generous, especially with young and aspiring artists with whom he could relate, even as he admired the famous:
“LeRoy also loved the self-made, the marginal, and the eccentric, some with large personalities and, at times, dubious professions.”
“What I already miss about LeRoy: His sense that the world is infinitely interesting. His desire, right up until the end, to work everyday in his huge Manhattan studio, where nothing had changed in many decades. His ability to capture anyone in a quick line or two — not unlike Picasso’s drawing brilliance. And, finally, his enthusiasm for art — all kinds of art — and his unqualified support for young artists.”
In a 2007 interview with The Washington Post, Neiman scoffed at those whom he said never tried to understand what he accomplished as an artist, and knew that he did have a legacy that they tried to deny:
"I've got the public. I don't care about the critics.”
A Few Good Reads
On Monday, the PBS American Masters documentary film series continues with a profile of Ted Williams. The “Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived” also includes the first known color footage of Williams in his last game in 1960, featuring a homerun in his last at-bat that became the topic of the famous John Updike story “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.”
The 8-millimeter film was shot by art student Bill Murphy, who cut class to attend the game at Fenway Park. This week The New York Times delved into how the film was almost forgotten. A Major League Baseball executive said of the discovery: “It seemed like a sign. I believe in the baseball gods.”
Murphy, now 78, has given his camera to his grandson, and is elated that some timeless imagery is finally getting a wider audience:
“It’s writing your own ending to your story; Ted is Ted to the end. It’s one of the great exits in all of sports.”
When it comes to baseball films of the fictional kind, writer Roger Angell knows which one is near the top of his list, as he told Anna Thorngate for The Criterion Collection:
“But this dream that it’s all about purity and boyhood dreams and innocence was so strong, and it all played out later on. Everything we’re talking about in discussing Bull Durham all played out in the eighties and nineties during the baseball wars, the economic wars, the player strikes, and the free-agency fight. Was it a sentimental, beautiful game that the players ought to be playing for fun—which many, many people believed? Or was it a very difficult sport that involved professionals?
Here’s Angell writing about “Bull Durham” the year after its release:
“It’s the first baseball movie that gets things right without trying: there isn’t a line in it that feels reverent or fake-tough or hurriedly explanatory, or that tries to fill in the uninitiated about what’s going on out there.”
“It’s an adult homage to the game, and it’s about people who have been around and have come back to baseball as grown-ups, willing to strip away the clichés and the uplift and the mystical crap to find how strong and funny and rich the sport remains at its center.”
From John Feinstein for Golf Digest, how stand-up comedy has helped PGA commentator David Feherty battle long-term depression and his son’s more recent drug-overdose death;
Another sports documentary is coming out soon, this one about the American Basketball Association’s Virginia Squires, also known as the first pro team for Julius Erving;
Alex Belth on summer and the city game, a collection of memorable playground hoops stories whose subjects include Earl Manigault and Lloyd Daniels;
A new stadium in downtown Washington for D.C. United opened just as Wayne Rooney arrived from England. But a longtime fan of the club feels betrayed by team management, and contends it’s disconnected from them and those who helped build Major League Soccer’s first dynasty;
Will Leitch takes some cheap generational shots in asserting that baseball’s steroids “panic” is almost over. I’m a Baby Boomer who’s never felt panicked by PEDs, but here’s his oversimplified conclusion about an age range of baseball fans who feel to him as though it's:
“ . . . more and more like the last gasp of a fading generational outrage, an emotional outburst and response to an increasingly wonkish and data-driven world: It feels more like Baby Boomers pounding their fists angry that it’s not 1961 anymore and athletes are not powered by Ovaltine the way they were told when they were 12.”
Sports History Files
From Stoke Hill Press, a new biography of Cecil Healy, the only Australian Olympic gold medalist to be killed in action in the Great War, is coming out to mark the centenary of his death. In Stockholm in 1912, he won gold in the 4x200 swimming relay race. Healy also was second in the 100-meter freestyle event won by American Duke Kahanamoku after the latter had initially been disqualified. The Australians, at Healy's urging, lobbied to have him reinstated. Co-author John Devitt wrote Kahanamoku said of Healy that “this is the true Olympic champion."
During 1914-15 Healy and Kahanamoku appeared together in surfing exhibitions, then Healy enlisted in the army. After Stockholm, he traveled through Europe, foreseeing international trouble, and wondering if 1916, the year of the next Olympics in Berlin, would “prove to be too late? Will the storm have burst before then?”
On Aug. 29, 1918, Healy was killed near the Somme when his 19th Sportsman’s Battalion was clearing out German machine-gun nests. One of 136 known Olympians killed on World War I battlefields, Healy, who was 36, is buried at the New British Military Cemetery in Assevillers, France. On Sept. 1 there will be a remembrance walk there, and the unveiling of an exhibition in Healy’s honor.
Here’s more about Stoke Hill Press, founded by Australian sports author and publishing veteran Geoff Armstrong in 2014.
Passings
Mitch Chortkoff, 78, was a Los Angeles-area sportswriter known for his coverage of the Showtime-era Lakers;
As the Los Angeles Times follows the lead of other newspapers and has moved out of its longtime downtown building, Bryan Curtis took a last look around the sports copy desk at the old place:
“Getting romantic about a newspaper sports office is like getting romantic about a laptop. A newspaper office is at best functional and at worst a pain in the ass. Yet the Times leaving its old headquarters felt like the occasion for a tribute to the guys who used to work there. Not the writers. A sports page belongs to the writers. A sports desk belongs to the editors, and more specifically, to the night staff who served as the writers’ backstops, grammarians, and, occasionally, their nemeses.”
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered Sundays. You can subscribe here and search the archives. This is Digest issue No. 132, published July 22, 2018.
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