Sports fans of a certain age know the late artist LeRoy Neiman for his athletic-inspired bold-colored paintings, but the Kent State University Museum wants more people to know about his style sense.
With help from the LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation, the exhibition “LeRoy Neiman: A Keen Observer of Style” will bow at Kent State in Kent, Ohio, on Oct. 31. The show will turn the spotlight on the artist’s early career years as a fashion illustrator. Visitors will learn how that experience influenced his lifelong interest in capturing the clothing, gestures, and style of his subjects with precision. Once the exhibition is up this fall, 85 of Neiman’s illustrations and sketches from the 1950s through the 1990s will be on view through June 28.
With his splashy hues and dynamic brushwork, the prolific Neiman was said to be never without a sketchbook during his 60-year-plus career. Growing up in St. Paul, Minn., Neiman used his drawing skills to peddle posters for local businesses and charging them a nickel for each one. He also drew ink tattoos on his classmates’ forearms for some extra spending money.
While enlisted in the U.S. Army, Neiman worked as an army cook, painted sets for Red Cross shows, and created murals for mess halls’ walls. Through the G.I. Bill, Neiman studied at the St. Paul School of Art and the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. At the latter, Neiman was part of the class of 1950 that included talents like Robert Clark (who later changed his last name to Indiana), and Leon Golub. After graduation, Neiman taught figure drawing and fashion illustration at SAIC.
Neiman started his career doing fashion illustrations at Carson Pirie Scott. There in 1954, he met his future wife as well as a copywriter for the department store. Hugh Hefner, who had just launched Playboy magazine, enlisted Neiman to write and illustrate a short story that wound up winning the Chicago Art Directors Award. Hefner tapped him to create a logo for Playboy: the Femlin. For 15 years, Neiman penned and illustrated the “Man at Leisure” column for Playboy, which borrowed from his living in Paris and often traveling to Deauville in the early 1960s. As the years wore on, the artist painted pillars in the arts, politics and sports with one of his most famous sports subjects being Muhammad Ali. Along with being the official artist of the 1972 Summer Olympiad, he used his knack for capturing the human body in motion for commissions from the Bolshoi Ballet in Russia, the New York Jets, Broadway shows and the Goodwill Games among other major events.
He was best known for his brilliantly colored, expressionist paintings and screen prints of athletes, musicians and major cultural moments, capturing hundreds of historic events and legendary figures over his six-decade career. There will also be items from Neiman’s personal wardrobe on display.
“This exhibition offers a rare glimpse into LeRoy’s lesser-known — but just as important — work in fashion illustration, capturing a pivotal and early stage of his career,” said Tara Zabor, executive director of the LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation. She said the exhibition is “a great moment to look closely at how he encapsulated design and gesture, and how this visual language would later shape some of his most iconic work.”
“Polo Spectators.”
Courtesy of LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation.
While Neiman’s work is closely associated with sports and celebrity, the museum’s curator Sara Hume wanted to show that his early work in fashion illustration informed his compositions throughout his career. “He captured so much of his subjects’ personality through his attention to their clothing and style,” she said.
“Ladies and Gentlemen at the Nite Club,” 1957.
Image Courtesy LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation
The museum’s director Sarah Spinner Laska first met Zabor six years ago and they stayed in touch. Last fall, the Kent State University Museum received a grant from the foundation to support the creation of a “learning lab” to make the museum’s collection more accessible to students and visitors. That partnership sparked a conversation around the foundation’s “extraordinary” collection of Neiman’s early fashion illustrations and led to this fall’s show, Laska said. “We’re thrilled to bring this perspective forward, especially during the museum’s 40th anniversary year, as we continue to expand the stories we tell through fashion,” she said.
Diehard Neiman fans can also find a more unexpected example of Neiman’s ties to fashion on eBay, where an autographed ivory-colored blazer with his signature on its lapel was being sold for $79,800 as of Friday afternoon.
