LeRoy Neiman (1921-2012) was a painter and printmaker from Saint Paul, Minnesota. Neiman grew up in Saint Paul’s Frog Town neighborhood, a community known for being particularly blue collar. Neiman showed an early interest and talent in drawing and would often create posters for local vendors and merchants to advertise in the windows of their stores.
He left Saint Paul to enlist in the Army, where he worked as a cook, and painted sets for the Red Cross shows. He also designed and painted murals on the walls of WWII mess halls. Upon his discharge, Neiman studied at the Saint Paul School of Art, as well as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While studying at the latter, Neiman was classmates with Robert Clark (later Robert Indiana). After graduation, he spent the next ten years teaching figure drawing at the School.
In 1954, Neiman met two significant people: his to-be wife Janet, as well as Hugh Hefner (a copywriter for Carson Pirie Scott who had just launched a new men’s magazine, Playboy). Hefner commissioned Neiman to illustrate a cover image for a short story, and this illustration won the Chicago Art Directors Award. Neiman also designed an iconic but scantily clad figure for the magazine: the Femlin. This blog post will go into no further detail on the female gremlin, but you may learn more on your own accord with a simple Google search. There is much information about her.
This began a partnership for Neiman that lasted over fifty years. Through this partnership, Neiman met and painted countless figures in the arts, politics, and sports. Neiman is also known for viewing life, and the representation of life, as epic and impressive acts and sported a great handlebar mustache his entire life, contributing to him being quite an eccentric but likeable character. Neiman was designated informally as the Olympian artist (the person revered to paint Olympic athletes) and did this for five Olympics.
Not only is Neiman respected due to his presence in museums, but also to his endeavors for arts education and philanthropy. LeRoy and Janet created the LeRoy Neiman Foundation to fund programs supporting and advancing arts education. This foundation created two areas of study at two different universities (Columbia and UCLA).
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