Virtual Art Tour

Leroy Neiman, American, born 1927

Copyright LeRoy Neiman.
The American Stock Exchange

"A day at the races, A night at the opera. These two lines, I think, reflect the spirit of my art and my lifestyle," Neiman states in his artist release. "My art is there for the people - the artist surrounded by the truth in which he grew and lives. The artist paints his own range of feelings about a situation-not a facsimile, but the moving spirit of a scene." Neiman sees the frenzied, changing quality in his paintings as symbolic of the realities of contemporary society and its rapidly moving, shifting and ever-changing panorama.

LeRoy Neiman was born in St. Paul, MN, where he dropped out of high school to serve four years in the Army during World War II. After his tour of duty, he returned to St. Paul, made up his high school credits and, in 1946, moved to Chicago to attend the Chicago Art Institute. Graduating in 1950, Neiman stayed on at the Art Institute where he taught fashion illustration and figure drawing for 10 years. Perhaps the greatest impetus to his eventual financial success and worldwide fame as an artist was his association in 1954 with Playboy magazine. Neiman painted hundreds of paintings for Playboy magazine and Playboy Clubs around the globe. He is well known for his diversity in his media and processes, as well as in his subject matter.

Over the years, Neiman has been closely involved with the world of sports, of which he says, "As a painter, I am drawn to the world of sports as a bird to the sky. It is all color and movement." This involvement began in his Chicago days, when he spent time painting and drawing at sporting events, something so unusual that coaches and athletes later confessed to not knowing what to make of him. He covered the Olympics for ABC from 1972 to 1980.

He has held one-man shows in galleries and museums in Chicago, London, Paris, New York, Dublin, Beverly Hills, Tokyo and Zaire. A more extensive biography is available on his Website - www.leroyneiman.com.

In 1986, Hammer Graphics wrote in their release of LeRoy Neiman's "The American Stock Exchange," "In the United States, the American Stock Exchange (AMEX) is second only in size to the New York Stock Exchange. Mr. Neiman portrays the Exchange floor as a hectic place where traders operate under a great deal of pressure. Numerous traders are engaging in all sorts of activities: consulting either with one another or their trading cards, scanning the computer-driven displays above the trading posts and making endless hand signals to the clerks on the deck. The traders wear brightly colored jackets - blue, yellow, green, orange and red - with each color corresponding to a specific trading house. There are women on the floor; the American Stock Exchange was the first exchange to elect women members in 1965.

"Mr. Neiman has beautifully rendered the architectural details of the Exchange building: the coffered ceiling; the high, arched windows; and the pilasters with their ornately carved capitals," the release continued. "The combination of high-powered, technological activity on the Exchange floor and the classical building which houses this activity, the old and the new gives a sense of history to 'The American Stock Exchange.' Originally known as 'The Curb' because its business was conducted on the street, the Exchange began in 1849. It first moved indoors in 1921 and adopted its present name in 1953."