The Artist Who Was Both Loved and Disdained

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

A couple of years ago, Lizzie Peabody, the host of the Smithsonian's podcast Side Door, received a suggestion.

She should do an episode about the artist Leroy Neiman.

Basically, like this guy was really foundational to representing American pop culture during this.

very specific era.

In the 1970s, Leroy Neiman was one of the most popular painters in America.

He sported a giant drooping mustache and made colorful kinetic images of famous musicians and athletes.

The people that love my paintings, they're spectators, they're not viewers.

They look at it for the experience and the re-experience for themselves.

He was on the sidelines of these games.

He was in these jazz clubs.

He was meeting these people.

He knew these people.

He wasn't like painting a photograph of Muhammad Ali.

He was friends with Muhammad Ali.

Lizzie was very interested in Neiman's life and his place in the culture.

But when it came to his art, I looked at the artwork and I thought, I mean, I kind of thought, like, okay, holiday in expressionists, like, what is there here to talk about?

Lizzie is not alone in this reaction.

Leroy Neiman was very, very successful beyond most artists' wildest dreams, but he wasn't particularly well respected by the art or critical establishment.

He's not in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

He's at the Smithsonian Museum of American History because of what he depicted and like how his paintings and his images were everywhere.

And so Lizzie set out to figure out how we decide what an artist means, what their legacy is, why they're important, why they matter, when their art is only a part of the answer.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Leroy Neiman was a character, a cultural gadfly, an omnipresent artist who sat for decades right at the nexus of professional success, cultural ubiquity, and critical disregard.

What made him so popular?

What made him so disdained?

And what can we learn from how he resolved this dissonance?

He knew who he was and he did his thing his way.

So today on Decodering, with the help of Lizzie Peabody, the life and lessons of Leroy Neiman.

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Here's Lizzie Peabody again.

This painting is enormous.

This is even bigger than I imagined it was.

Can you go stand next to it for me?

For real?

Yeah.

I'm just inside the entrance to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History with curator Eric Jench.

Eric's going.

Eric is 6'2 ⁇ .

It is like twice as tall as you are.

The museum isn't open yet, so this space, which ordinarily would be echoing with visitors' voices, is quiet.

But towering over Eric is a painting that's loud.

It's like this big

collage of like color and sound.

Which is, you know, I think what you feel a good way of describing jazz, right?

The painting is called Big Band.

It shows 18 American jazz legends playing together in a cacophony of color.

You kind of have this vibrancy around Billie Holiday, this orange and yellow.

And then Ella Fitzgerald, it kind of goes into these pinks and florals through Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.

You have these darker blues, you know.

And then up near Gene Krupa, it's like more energetic, this purple.

It shows like you have these swaths of color, but I think even though it's a visual medium, you kind of get a sense of jazz and that it's very fluid, improvisational, lots of colors, hues, emotions, characters, you know, voices.

In real life, these musicians never shared the same stage.

Their different musical styles would have made collaboration tough.

But here they are, like a fantasy sports team of jazz players, brought to life in the classic style of artist Leroy Nieman.

It's very much Leroy Nieman, who is probably one of the first artists that I was ever really aware of as a kid.

It's a very distinct style,

these bright colors, this sort of celebrities, in this case, jazz musicians.

You may not recognize Nieman's name, but you almost certainly know his style.

It's an energetic mix of hyper-real color and hasty-looking lines that give it a sense of action.

It's distinctive, but surprisingly hard to define.

It is expressionism, is it impressionism?

It's just like he's a Niemanism.

He is a very

recognizable.

That's a good way to say it.

Nieman's artwork papered the 1950s through the 90s.

It was everywhere, especially places you wouldn't expect to find art.

Sports Illustrated magazine, chess tournaments, the racetracks, political conventions, the Olympic Games, and Playboy magazine.

He painted entertainers, athletes, and celebrities, and became friends with many of them.

He made millions of dollars from his art and became a celebrity himself.

But not everyone loved Neiman.

In 2012, when he died, the New York Times published a review of his work, and in it, the critic called him a hack.

The article reads, Mr.

Neiman, who died this week at 91, was not an artist who anyone in what I will here call the serious art world ever cared about.

But why?

We'll be right back.

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Leroy Nieman first got attention for his art in the U.S.

Army.

while stationed in Europe during World War II.

He

got sent off to paint camouflage on the roofs of the tents because they didn't want them to be bombed, right?

This is Heather Long, Leroy Neiman's niece.

And instead of painting camouflage, he painted a beautiful nude on top.

I'm not sure that they would have avoided the bomb that way.

That sounds about as attention-getting as you can get.

Yeah.

Leroy Neiman was drawing from the time he could hold a pencil.

As a kid growing up poor in the Depression, he would draw temporary tattoos on his classmates' arms and even earned some change drawing ads for the local grocer.

He was drafted into the Army as a cook, but he found ways to paint.

I did a cheesecake mural and

nudes romping around jumping through donuts.

This is Neiman in an interview with the Jazz Oral History Program at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History back in 2006.

Nieman was 85 at the time.

I made myself conspicuous and I got special treatment for it, so I drew everything.

I never painted a mural, but if you can paint or draw, you can do anything.

Leroy painted posters and backdrops for Red Cross productions.

In the Army, he got his first inklings that he might be able to make a living as an artist.

And when he got back to the United States, he saw how.

The Stars and Stripes published the story that that for every day you're in the Army, you get a day of free education in the GI Bill.

And I knew the day, the moment I read that piece, where my life was going to be, I applied to a bunch of art schools.

On the GI Bill, Nieman went to the prestigious school of the Art Institute of Chicago.

And after graduating, he joined the faculty and taught figure drawing and fashion illustration.

Renowned galleries started buying his work, like the Minneapolis Art Institute and the Corcoran Gallery in D.C.

He was well on his way to becoming a respected fine artist.

And then he found Playboy.

Yes.

Or Playboy might have found him.

I'm not sure.

But they needed some little drawing.

Hugh Hefner was asking for some little drawing, I guess, on the Playboy joke page.

In the early 1950s, Playboy magazine was Hugh Hefner's brand new idea.

In each issue, just behind the center fold, was a party jokes page.

Hefner asked Nieman to add an illustration, and he did.

And that became the femlin for which he became so famous.

The femlin was a female gremlin, though to be honest, she's not very gremlin-y.

More like a teacup-sized cocktail waitress.

Sketched in black ink, she scampered around the jokes page, climbing into highball glasses and making sexy mischief.

The femlin is

a saucy girl in black tights and not much else.

She was a hit.

So popular that the framed prints at Playboy clubs had to be bolted to the walls because they'd disappear.

Proving, says Leroy, that larceny is the sincerest form of flattery.

Neiman became Playboy Magazine's artist in residence.

And this is a little hard to get from our perspective today, but in its early days, Playboy wasn't just selling naughty pictures.

It was selling a young male fantasy of the good life.

And to that end, Neiman traveled all across the world, writing and illustrating a feature called Man at His Leisure, his jet setter's guide to the world's hottest spots.

Leroy went around the world drawing and writing about these little episodes in Rome and in Paris.

And I mean, he was living this kind of high life.

This is Carol Becker.

She's dean of the Columbia University School of the Arts and also a friend of Leroy Neiman's.

She says, Neiman went to the bullfights in Spain, film festivals on the Riviera.

He was having these adventures that everyone wished they could be having.

And he was doing these little images of them and drawings of them.

And that was all being reproduced in Playboy.

And Playboy was getting more and more readers every month.

They went from selling a million magazines per issue in 1960 to nearly 6 million by the mid-70s.

So Leroy was in the middle of all of this, and he was making all these images, and he was becoming famous as a result of it.

While Neiman was in Chicago working for Playboy, he'd go out in search of live music.

That's when I got into jazz.

The Playboy building was

across the alley from the chapierie.

A nightclub.

I'd walk across there in the afternoon.

Sometimes there'd be somebody rehearsing to go and check out what's going on over there.

Neiman would sketch the jazz musicians.

But Louis was there at that time.

Louis Armstrong.

He was good company.

And he was fun and he would talk to you.

I liked him very much.

Neiman sought out jazz for the action of it, the closeness and the physicality of the players.

And it's all so intimate and

the people love to be close to these guys.

The music would sound bitter far away but they just want to be close.

I do.

I do it because I draw but

there's something about the

loudness of it and

the flair that they have.

To Neiman, drawing jazz players was different from drawing other musicians.

You can do a string brew, classical, and not identify the people.

But when you get to jazz, you've got to draw the individuals.

People want to see an image of somebody they recognize.

Neiman painted the faces people would recognize.

He has stories about everyone from Ella Fitzgerald

to Miles Davis.

Miles was always a problem because he always wanted to have a relationship with your woman.

To Duke Ellington.

He was so classy.

God, he was classy.

The same things that drew Neiman to jazz clubs also took him to sports stadiums.

The crowds, the motion, the big personalities.

He'd take his sketchpad to boxing matches, the racetracks, baseball games.

Neiman wrote in his memoir, Almost immediately I became immersed in the spectacle of big-time sports and the hysteria and adrenaline of the spectators.

He would sit at the NFL games and he would draw.

And he was like a people's artist, you know?

And people recognized him.

And he dressed in this very flamboyant way always.

And

whether it was the cape or the mustache.

Oh, yeah.

Neiman had a look.

He wore brightly colored linen shirts.

And his niece, Heather, says, matching colorful socks.

No black socks.

And of course, his handlebar mustache.

And under that mustache, a long cigar.

He always had his cigar with him.

He generally stood out from the crowd.

And the strangeness of a guy sketching live on location at a sports stadium got him noticed by the local TV stations broadcasting the games.

They'd pan in on his sketch pad while he'd flourish his pencil and with a few lines bring the action to life on paper.

Leroy Neiman says adversity brings out the best in him.

And after all, he does work in watered colors.

In this TV clip, Neiman is sketching a Chiefs game in the pouring rain.

It'd be much more comfortable to have a telephoto lens and be up and up where it's warm.

But here's where you see the people the way they are.

Neiman's captured many Kansas City stars along the way.

He's worked in bad weather before.

Look at yourself.

You're here yourself, aren't you?

We're all here.

We're all crazy.

As the sports media empire grew through the 70s and 80s, Neiman rode that wave, reaching massive audiences drawing on live TV, long before Bob Ross set up his easel.

His ear-to-ear mustache became a fixture on the sidelines of the Super Bowl and the World Series, Wimbledon and the Kentucky Derby.

He was the official artist of the Olympic Games five times, and the New York Jets made him their artist in residence.

Once when the Jets were playing really poorly, the crowd began to chant, put Leroy in!

Put Leroy in!

He was becoming as much a celebrity as the people on his canvas.

Here he is on TV with Merv Griffin in 1980.

That's a lot of love.

We're all very proud of you, Leroy.

I want the people to love what I do because I love what I do and I love the people that I do.

Most of all, you love action, don't you?

I love action and I love the people who do it well.

Neiman painted and sketched over 100 portraits of Muhammad Ali, who became his very close friend.

One portrait shows Ali mid-punch, his eyeballs and teeth startling flashes of white against bright splashes of red, blue, and yellow.

Is there an aesthetic connection between art and sports?

Oh, decidedly.

Sports are graceful and beautiful.

And I think any work of art worth its substance,

worth its being or being done, is to be strong.

Strength is a part of beauty.

And strength is a big part of sports.

He was drawn to these incredible athletes and he was interested in drawing the body and representing the body.

He wasn't ironic about it at all.

He cared about it.

He was reverential.

He was reverential.

That's a good word.

And I think that's why people want to own those prints and why regular people who may not have any other art in their house or even think about art will buy Leroy Neiman prints and want to live with them because they are hopeful.

Carol Becker of the Columbia University School of the Arts says Neiman was a populist artist.

When I say populist, I mean appealing to a very large audience.

He wasn't doing things that people would have a hard time understanding.

You know, when someone, he always told told the story of someone leaping out of a manhole cover and saying, Leroy, you know, somebody working on the sewer system knew him.

But I don't think that probably worked in his favor in terms of the art world.

That probably

wanted him to be more elite than he was.

By the end of his career, Neiman was earning $10 million a year on his art.

He'd been all over the world, drawn every celebrity celebrity you can think of.

But for the man who seemed to be able to go anywhere, open any door, the door to the so-called serious art world remained shut tight.

For the most part, art critics ignored him, and if prompted to comment on his work, wrote things like, What Howard Johnson is to the taste buds, Leroy Neiman is to the eyes.

Neiman makes art for people who don't like art.

His technique has been variously described as gaudy, cheesy, vulgar, schlocky, and holiday-in expressionist.

I asked his niece, Heather, what Nieman made of this.

He

never

said anything about that.

He must have believed that, you know, eventually people are going to recognize my work.

That respect from the fine art world never really came, but why not?

After the break, we'll hear from the critics.

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We're back, and we're talking about the life and work of celebrity artist Leroy Neiman.

Neiman was, by all measures, an astoundingly successful artist.

Well, all measures but one.

He was the artist that critics loved to hate.

When Neiman died in 2012, art critic Ken Johnson doubled down in the New York Times, writing, Is the serious art world wrong to exclude and disdain Mr.

Neiman and his art?

I don't think so.

So I called him up.

I read your piece and

I just kept thinking, this is so mean.

What made you write it at that moment?

You know, he wasn't even buried.

Oh, boy.

You're not the first person to say to me, I read your review.

That was kind of mean.

And

I don't know.

I think.

My obligation to my audience is to be honest about my feelings.

Ken has worked as an art art critic for most of his career, and he says it's his job as a critic to be frank about his opinion.

If everybody sort of hides their opinions behind euphemism, then we don't know what we're talking about.

Culture starts to become mush.

You got to call them like you see him.

I asked him to read a little more of the piece aloud.

Mr.

Neiman was the archetypal hack.

With his ever-present cigar and enormous mustache, he was a cliché of the bon vivant and a bad artist in every way.

But it's a good question.

What was I thinking?

His body was barely cold, and I'm writing this stuff.

But

I think in some ways, when I'm writing something like that, I know people are going to go, what?

I can't believe you said that.

And so there's a certain kind of fun that comes out in criticism when you're taking on something that you really think deserves it.

But I wanted to know: what about Nieman's work deserves this criticism?

Ken says, take the big band painting, for example.

Like, what does this music mean to him?

What you get are all these little fragments that look like people playing on color television or something.

It's too sweet.

It's this monotonously televisual view of life in the world.

Are you saying, so you're saying he didn't have a point of view or he didn't have an end?

He had a point of view and it was very, it was it was so banal it was just so banal that's what i want to say

to to present in other words in other words what what i think you want from an artist especially if his purview is society and culture to have some kind of critical element you know i just want it a little more complicated

so do you think that neiman might have achieved more critical acclaim if he were more critical himself yes

So what is the role of the artist then in your mind?

It's to see the world, warts and all.

And he didn't see enough warts.

I don't think he saw any.

You know, it's...

It sounds like the very thing that made him so popular was what disqualified him from critical acclaim.

He wasn't challenging anything.

That's really a great observation.

Neiman does not challenge.

Jerry Saltz is the senior art critic for New York magazine.

So he's a big deal.

To me, Leroy Neiman was this weird sort of hippie Carnaby Street dandy who always had the Salvador Dolly mustache and wore colorful clothes and smoked long cigars and hung out with Heff

and Playboy bunnies and drew Sammy Davis Jr.

and Liza and Rocky Sylvester Stallone, Kentucky Derby horses and more Playboy bunnies.

And I just thought,

what the hell is this guy?

Now,

his style is kind of a mishmash between abstract expressionism, color field painting, really bad school of Paris, crapola.

Jerry says he never thought much about Neiman until one day in 2009.

It was springtime, and Jerry was giving the commencement address to the Columbia School of Fine Arts graduates.

I was there on the stage about to give my address, and there was Leroy Neiman.

And I got completely pointy-headed, elitist, art critic creature thinking, I do not want to be seen with Leroy Neiman.

I mean, my God, I'm this important art critic.

What's he doing here?

The ceremony began, and Jerry learned what Neiman was doing there.

He was receiving an honorary professorship of the arts.

See, there's this whole part of Neiman's life that, unlike most things, he didn't flaunt.

And it has to do with how he spent his money.

He never had other fancy houses.

He didn't have boats.

He didn't have fancy cars.

He didn't have those things that you could do with all that money.

He used his money in a different way.

Carol Becker says, when Neiman was teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago way back in the 1950s, he was sat on admissions.

And he thought there was this wonderful young woman that she should get to study.

And no one agreed with him.

And the reason they didn't agree with him was she was African-American.

He was just horrified.

So when it became successful, he wanted to be sure that anyone who had talent could go to school and become an artist.

And he put money towards that.

He gave scholarship money for that purpose.

Leroy donated scholarships for low-income art students and started several art programs for high schoolers.

He donated the Center for Print Studies at Columbia University, where young artists learn from more experienced printmakers and where artists who've never worked in printmaking at all can try their hand at it.

Part of the proceeds from those prints fund more student scholarships.

Unlike

most super famous artists that made his kind of big bucks, Neiman gave back.

So, back on stage at the Columbia commencement ceremony, Jerry Saltz was hearing a lot of this for the first time and realizing when it came to Neiman, I never really spent much time.

The truth is, the whole art world never spent spent much time on Leroy Neiman.

Jerry gave his speech.

And at the end of the ceremony, out of nowhere, Janet, his wife, came up to me with a sheet of paper and said, Leroy wanted you to have this.

And I looked down and saw an incredible quick sketch portrait of me talking with my hands, my big mouth open, gesturing.

And it said, Jerry Salt addresses Columbia graduates, Leroy Neiman, May something,

2009.

And I looked down and all my,

I guess, cloaking devices and defenses and our world self-importance dropped for a minute.

I've always considered myself a kind of populist, a people's critic.

And in this moment, I suddenly realized Leroy Nieman, in spite of me not loving or liking his work, had for a lifetime done what I had been preaching to the students exactly to do, which was

your style finds you,

and that it is your job to explore its furthest reaches and i suddenly understood that leroy neiman had done exactly this

and just like the grinch on christmas jerry felt his chest start to twitch and swell my heart opened and thought

well gosh darn it

I too can accept Leroy Neiman,

even if he's not my cup of tea, he's a cup of tea.

He is a cup of tea.

He is a real specific cup of tea.

And you know what?

That's not easy to do.

Listen, one of the hardest things to do for any artist is to develop a style that is both instantaneously recognizable as that person's style and also the style says something.

Nieman's style definitely says something, loudly and proudly, but it doesn't say the same thing to everybody.

If you walk into the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, you'll find a floor-to-ceiling painting of 18 jazz masters.

What's your first reaction when you look at the painting?

Oh, I think it would be exuberant.

It's incredibly vibrant.

I think, oh my God, that's so ugly.

There's something very open, celebratory, and fun.

When I look at Big Band,

the problems fall away a little bit.

I see love.

In 1995, Nieman told American Artist magazine, maybe the critics are right.

But what am I supposed to do about it?

Stop painting?

Change my work completely?

I go back to the studio, and there there I am at the easel again.

I enjoy what I'm doing and I feel good working.

Other thoughts are just crowded out.

In fact, it was Duke Ellington that told me one favorite quote I had from Duke.

He said, we all become more of what we already are.

Isn't that a great statement?

We all become more of what we already are.

I would only say to anybody listening to this podcast, get to work, you big babies.

There's something really big in you that wants to self-replicate, get out of its damn way, and make some bad art.

I'm Lizzie Peabody.

I'm Willip Haskin.

This is Dakota Ring.

Thanks to Lizzie and the Smithsonian for bringing us this story.

It first aired on their terrific podcast, Side Door.

They have a lot more stories like this one, so please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

To see a picture of Leroy Nieman's big band painting, we'll include a link in our show notes.

You can find me on Twitter at Willipaskin, and if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

Decodering is produced by me and Katie Shepard.

Derek John is executive producer of narrative podcasts.

Merrick Jacob is our technical director.

The side door podcast team is Justin O'Neill, James Morrison, Stephanie DeLionc, Ann Conanen, Caitlin Schaefer, Tammy O'Neal, Jess Sadek, Lara Koch, and Sharon Bryant.

The show is mixed by Tarek Fuda, and the theme song and episode music are by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Special thanks to the Leroy Neiman and Janet Byrne-Neiman Foundation, especially Tara Zabor, Dan Duray, Heather Long, and Janet Neiman.

Also, thank you to the team at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Art History: Stephanie Johnson, Ken Kimmery, Theo Gonzalvez, Eric Gensch, John Troutman, Crystal Klingenberg, Valeska Hilbig, and Laura Duff.

Thank you to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings for contributing music for this episode and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, which you also heard.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Even better, tell your friends.

We'll see you next week.

Tell Jerry I said he can't possibly, in any way, honestly like

Nieman's work.

Tell him if he says he likes it.

I think he's prevaricating.

I'll tell him you said so.

Ken Johnson, you are a great critic and a good painter, and you are one damn komucha.

I'll pass the message along.

Don't use words like prevaricate, for God's