No one talks much about LeRoy Neiman today, but during his heyday, in the 1960s and 1970s, the cigar-smoking, mustachioed artist was as famous for his playboy persona as he was for his splashy, colorful depictions of sporting events and high life in general. Art critics despised him, but like Peter Max and Thomas Kinkade, he found riches by catering to wealthy collectors who adorned their dens with his Technicolor version of the world they all wished to inhabit. Travis Vogan does a masterful job bringing both Neiman and his times to vibrant life, never sparing in his critique but appropriately sympathetic to a self-made man who produced high-gloss schlock.
He created many of his works live on ABC as the sporting events unfolded, with Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath as particularly favorite subjects. “I’m not just loved. I’m superloved,” he once boasted, and that affection allowed him to own up to 10 apartments in Manhattan’s Hotel des Artistes. He was devoted to his wife of 55 years, who made sure he looked his dapper best as he went out to events with a much younger woman on his arm. LeRoy died at age 91 in 2012, his grave in New York’sWoodlawn Cemetery marked by a large slab with his trademark, loopy signature boldly engraved above the words “Rest in Peace. Forever Remembered.” His best memorial is this book, which so persuasively and elegantly places him in the center of late-20th-century American popular culture.
