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Sports fans of a certain age know the late artist Leroy Neiman because of his sporty, brave painting, but the Kent State University Museum wants more people to learn about his style.
With the help of the Leroy Neiman and the Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation, the exhibition “Leroy Neiman: An enthusiastic observer of the style” will bow in Kent State in Kent, Ohio on October 31. Visitors learn how this experience influenced his lifelong interest in taking clothes, gestures and the style of his topics with precision. As soon as the exhibition has expired in autumn, 85 of the illustrations and sketches from Neiman from the 1950s to the 1990s will be shown until June 28th.
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With its lively colors and its dynamic brush work, the productive Neiman should never be without a sketchbook during his 60-year career. Neiman grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota and used its sign capabilities to kick posters for local companies and to calculate a nickel for everyone. He also drew ink tattoos on the forearms of his classmates for additional expenditure money.
While he joined the US Army, Neiman worked as an army chef, painted sets for the Red Cross and created wall paintings for walls of the measuring halls. Through the GI Bill, Neiman studied at the St. Paul School of Art and the School of Art Institute of Chicago. In the latter, Neiman was part of the 1950 class, which contained talents like Robert Clark (which later changed his last name in Indiana) and Leon Golub. After completing the conclusion, Neiman figure taught drawing and fashion illustration at Saic.
Neiman started his career as fashion illustrations at Carson Pirie Scott. There he met his future wife and a copywriter for the department store in 1954. Hugh Hefner, who had just launched the Playboy Magazine, has obliged Neiman to write and illustrate a short story that won the Chicago Art Directors Award. Hefner bought him to create a logo for Playboy: The Femlin. Neiman wrote and illustrated the column “Man in Leisure” for Playboy for 15 years, who lent his living in Paris in the early 1960s and often traveled to Deauville. Over the years, the artist painted pillars in art, politics and sport, with one of his most famous sports subjects being Muhammad Ali. In addition to the official artist of the Summer Olympiad 1972, he used his talent to catch the human body in motion for commissions from the Bolshoi ballet in Russia, the New York Jets, Broadway shows and the Goodwill games.
He was the best known for his brilliantly colored, expressionist paintings and screen prints by athletes, musicians and great cultural moments, which hold hundreds of historical events and legendary figures in his six decades career. Items are also issued by Neiman’s personal wardrobe.
“This exhibition offers a rare insight into Leroy’s less well-known also important work in fashion illustration and captures a decisive and early phase of his career,” said Tara Zabor, managing director of Leroy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation. She said that the exhibition was “a great moment to see exactly how he embodies design and gesture and how this visual language would later shape some of his most famous work.”
While Neiman’s work is closely related to sports and celebrity, the curator of the museum, Sara Hume, wanted to show that his early work in fashion illustration informed his compositions throughout his career. “He captured so much of the personality of his subjects through his attention and their style,” she said.
The director of the Museum Sarah Spinner Laska took Zabor for the first time six years ago and she stayed in touch. Last autumn, the Kent State University Museum received a grant from the foundation to support the creation of a “learning laboratory” in order to make the collection of the Museum for Students and visitors more accessible. This partnership triggered a conversation about the “extraordinary” collection of Neiman’s Early Fashion illustrations of the foundation and led to the show of this autumn, said Laska. “We are enthusiastic to advance this perspective, especially in the 40th anniversary of the museum, as we expand the stories that we tell through fashion,” she said.
Diehard Neiman fans also find an unexpected example of Neiman’s connections to fashion on Ebay, where on Friday afternoon a signed ivory-colored blazer with his signature was sold on his lapel for $ 79,800.
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