Arnold Newman; NY Times obituary
Hyfler/Rosner
NY Times
Andy Grundberg
Arnold Newman, Portrait Photographer Who Captured the
Essence of His Subjects, Dies at 88
Arnold Newman, the portrait photographer whose pictures of
some of the world's most eminent people set a standard for
artistic interpretation and stylistic integrity in the
postwar age of picture magazines, died yesterday in
Manhattan. He was 88 and lived on the Upper West Side.
The apparent cause was a heart attack, said Ron Kurtz, the
owner of Commerce Graphics, which represents Mr. Newman.
A polished craftsman, Mr. Newman first learned his trade by
making 49-cent studio portraits in Philadelphia. He went on
to become one of the world's best-known and most admired
photographers, his work appearing on the covers of magazines
like Life and Look, in museum and gallery exhibitions and in
coffee-table books.
Mr. Newman was credited with popularizing a style of
photography that became known as environmental portraiture.
Working primarily on assignment for magazines, he carried
his camera and lighting equipment to his subjects, capturing
them in their surroundings and finding in those settings
visual elements to evoke their professions and
personalities.
Perhaps his most celebrated image is a 1946 portrait of the
composer Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky, his expression deeply
serious, is confined to the bottom left corner of the
picture, cropped to his head and shoulders, an elbow resting
on the piano, his hand supporting his head. The rest of the
photograph is taken up by the raised lid of a large grand
piano, strategically silhouetted against a blank wall, which
is divided off-center into a gray and white rectangle. The
lid forms the reversed shape of a leaning, abstract musical
note.
By contrast, his 1949 portrait of the Modernist artist Jean
Arp was taken at such an extreme close-up that the viewer
sees only a hand, the right eye and a cheek and a curving,
sensuous form that is unidentifiable but evocative.
Each Newman photograph had a metaphoric quality. For the
folk painter Grandma Moses he arranged a homey shot, posing
her in her Victorian parlor like the woman in "Whistler's
Mother." The fashion photographer Cecil Beaton was captured,
beautifully dressed, in the salon of his English country
house. For Andy Warhol, Mr. Newman composed a surreal
close-up collage in which he cut out Warhol's features and
repositioned them askew from where they would normally be.
The "environmental" approach was what largely distinguished
Mr. Newman's portraits from those of his contemporaries.
Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, for example, preferred to
work within the bald white arena of their studios.
A Face of Evil
Mr. Newman's methods had more in common with the candid,
photojournalistic style of portraiture developed by Henri
Cartier-Bresson and Alfred Eisenstaedt. But he was more
deliberate about composition; his gift for formal design was
always much in evidence. He used a large-format camera and
tripod to ensure that every detail of a scene was recorded.
"As my own approach took form, it became evident that a good
portrait had first to be a good photograph," he said in a
companion book to a 1986 exhibition, "Arnold Newman: Five
Decades," organized by the Museum of Photographic Arts in
San Diego. The exhibition was just one of many in his
career; beyond his magazine work, he established an enviable
reputation in the art world. Gallery exhibitions began
presenting his work as early as 1941.
Mr. Newman's best-known images were in black and white,
although he often photographed in color. Several of his
trademark portraits were reproduced in color and in black
and white. Perhaps the most famous was a sinister picture of
the German industrialist Alfried Krupp, taken for Newsweek
in 1963. Krupp, long-faced and bushy-browed, is made to look
like Mephistopheles incarnate: smirking, his fingers clasped
as he confronts the viewer against the background of a
assembly line in the Ruhr. In the color version his face has
a greenish cast.
The impression it leaves was no accident: Mr. Newman knew
that Krupp had used slave labor in his factories during the
Nazi reign and that he had been imprisoned after World War
II for his central role in Hitler's war machine.
"When he saw the photos, he said he would have me declared
persona non grata in Germany," Mr. Newman said of Krupp.
Mr. Newman enjoyed personifying the stereotypically
irascible New Yorker. He often used his gregariousness to
coax attitudes or gestures from his subjects. But he never
endorsed the critical term widely used to describe his style
of portraiture.
"Although my approach has become popularly known as
environmental portraiture," he wrote in the early 1980's,
"it only suggests a part of what I have been doing and am
doing. Overlooked is that my approach is also symbolic and
impressionistic or whatever label one cares to use."
He specialized in photographing artists, beginning with
those of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist
painters, whom he met in New York in the 1940's. He later
photographed Picasso, Braque, Miró and other major European
Modernists. In the 1960's and 70's his subjects, in addition
to Warhol, included Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg and Louise
Nevelson.
He was also admired for his photographs of American
presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Gerald R. Ford, as well
as world leaders like Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and David
Ben-Gurion of Israel. His portrait of President Lyndon B.
Johnson was chosen as the official White House portrait.
Arnold Abner Newman was born March 3, 1918, in New York, the
second of three sons of a clothing manufacturer and his
wife. When he was 2, his father's business failed and the
family moved to Atlantic City, where his father became a
dry-goods merchant and managed several small hotels. During
the Depression the family lived part of the year in Miami
Beach, where Mr. Newman's father operated resort hotels.
After graduating from high school in Miami Beach in 1936, he
studied painting at the University of Miami, initially on a
scholarship. But after two years he was unable to afford
college and decided to pursue a burgeoning interest in
photography, moving to Philadelphia to work for a chain of
portrait studios.
There he socialized with students at what was then called
the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts, where
Alexey Brodovitch, the influential art director of Harper's
Bazaar, was teaching. The experimental approach that
Brodovitch encouraged apparently found its way to Mr. Newman
through those students. His photographs soon showed a
penchant for graphic simplicity.
In his time away from work, Mr. Newman began to take
social-documentary photographs in the manner of Walker Evans
and Dorothea Lange and, more creatively, to produce
graphically abstract views of city walls, porches and
chairs.
He returned to Florida in 1939 to manage a portrait studio
in West Palm Beach. Three years later he opened his own
business, the Newman Portrait Studio in Miami Beach, which
he ran during World War II. He traveled to New York
frequently and had the first exhibition of his work at the
A. D. Gallery in Manhattan. He met Alfred Stieglitz,
Beaumont Newhall and Ansel Adams, then the most influential
figures in art photography.
Artists in Their Habitats
Beginning in 1941 he produced a series of cutout collages,
in which he engineered Cubist effects by cutting his prints
into various shapes and combining them to form disjointed
images. He returned to this technique in the 1960's in his
interpretive portrait of Warhol as well as similar ones of
the artist Dan Flavin and the writer Henry Miller, among
others.
It was also in 1941 that he took his first artistically
successful environmental portraits. And it was then that he
began photographing artists in earnest. Among his subjects
were Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian. Most
are pictured with examples of their work.
He stayed with that approach for essentially the rest of his
career, with some exceptions: his most widely reproduced
portrait of Picasso, for example, taken in France in 1954,
shows only the artist in close-up, holding his hand to his
brow.
In 1945 the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized an
exhibition of Newman portraits of artists. When the show,
"Artists Look Like This," closed, the museum bought the
prints.
After the war, in 1946, Mr. Newman relocated to New York and
opened Arnold Newman Studios. By now Brodovitch was well
aware of Mr. Newman's growing renown and gave him
assignments to take portraits for Harper's Bazaar. One was
the famous Stravinsky photograph, which was rejected for
publication. But soon Life, Look and Holiday were calling,
too. In 1947 alone, four of Mr. Newman's photographs
appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and in the 1950's,
Life and other magazines sent him to Europe, Africa and Asia
to take portraits.
Despite his many assignments for Life, he never joined its
celebrated photography staff, choosing to remain a
freelancer even after his marriage, in 1949, to Augusta
Rubenstein and the birth of their two sons, Eric and David.
All survive Mr. Newman, Eric living in Minneapolis and David
in Portland, Ore. Four grandchildren also survive him.
In 1953 Mr. Newman's work was the subject of a second museum
exhibition, at the Art Institute of Chicago, and by the end
of the 50's his pictures were so pervasive - many as
advertising assignments - that he was voted one of the
world's 10 best photographers in a poll published by Popular
Photography magazine.
A Focus on World Leaders
In the 1960's, however, Mr. Newman's environmental approach
to the portrait lost favor as rebellious and
Surrealist-influenced styles gained in popularity. For some
critics and collectors, what once looked so fresh and
original now seemed too facile; his attention to powerful
and successful men and women appeared, in those
counterculture days, as too flattering; and his immaculate
work seemed too sleek and too well-made. But the rise of the
art market for photographs in the 1970's brought his work to
the attention of a new generation.
In 1979 the National Portrait Gallery in London commissioned
Mr. Newman to create portraits of Britain's leading cultural
and intellectual figures. The work, appearing in an
exhibition and a book called "The Great British," created a
stir largely because no British photographer had been deemed
adequate to the task. In 1992 the National Portrait Gallery
in Washington produced an American counterpart, "Arnold
Newman's Americans," using pictures selected from his work
of the last 50 years.
Mr. Newman remained characteristically caustic about the
enthusiasm for what is now known as art photography. "Those
who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant
egoists," he told The Detroit News in 1993.
Mr. Newman taught photography at Cooper Union for many
years, and the book, "One Mind's Eye," a collection of his
finest portraits published in 1974, became a popular
coffee-table accessory for many collectors. Other books
devoted to his work are "Bravo Stravinksy" (1967), "Artists:
Portraits From Four Decades" (1980) and "Arnold Newman's
Americans" (1992).
Mr. Newman photographed so many of the world's most
prominent and accomplished men and women that it sometimes
seemed as if there was no public figure that his lens had
left untouched. But there were subjects he generally steered
clear of: actors, actresses, rock stars and anyone he
considered, as he put it, "famous for being famous."
"I hate the whole idea of celebrity," he said.