Arnold Newman; Guardian obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Portrait photographer of great 20th-century artists and
writers
Amanda Hopkinson
Monday June 12, 2006
Guardian
Arnold Newman, who has died aged 88, was one of the most
important portrait photographers of the last century. As
astute with lighting as Irving Penn or Richard Avedon, as
interested in the humanity of his subjects (or their lack of
it) as Edward Steichen or Henri Cartier-Bresson, Newman
combined some of the signal characteristics of these very
different genres of portraiture with a style entirely his
own.
Approximately described as "environmental portraiture", this
style spelt a move away from the studio without going as far
as the street. Newman wished to control all aspects of his
images. Despite a stated preference for "natural light", he
employed a battery of lights, for choice "bounced" off a
screen to mute the harshness of a direct spot. His
preference for photographing his subjects in their own
surroundings meant rarely venturing outside: not only could
he not control the skies but, more significantly, he could
not as easily "arrange the environment". The reason why his
portrait of Max Ernst is flanked by so many of his most
famous works and influences is due to a rapid re-hang of his
living-room wall; Piet Mondrian holds his easel, not in the
simplistic fashion of an artist demonstrating his
profession, but in the symbolic manner of contributing to
the geometry that so clearly reflects his art, by making it
intrinsic to the photographic composition.
Where it was inconvenient, if not impossible, for Newman to
take his subjects in domestic situ, he recreated their
natural habitat. Modern dance pioneer Martha Graham is at
her practice bar; Igor Stravinsky, who in 1946 was visiting
New York, at the concert grand where he was rehearsing. To
indicate either the investment of the artist in his chosen
instrument, or simply to create a more dramatic composition,
Newman posed Stravinsky leaning on an elbow that forms the
base of a minim continued upwards by the prop of the piano
lid, itself leaning drunkenly backwards like an outsized
crotchet.
Newman, who went on to do an entire book on Stravinsky,
commented: "In this image there is no environment, nor does
the viewer seek or need it - it is seen as intended, not
real but symbolic. So is Mondrian's easel and his carefully
placed wall decorations. Environment and personal objects
also become symbols of the subject, and in some photographs,
the subject becomes a symbol of himself or what he or she
represents."
The symbolism applies to personal morality as well as to
abstract artistry. One famous portrait of the German
industrialist Alfred Krupp, taken in both black and white
and in a sickly green colour variant in 1963, shows a
Faustian character with a shadowy jaw resting on bear-sized
clasped hands, against a backdrop of factory trains. The
viewer hardly needs a caption to know that this man was
instrumental to the Nazi regime, jailed after the Nuremberg
trials for using slave labour. Yet Krupp was shocked by the
result, unable to see himself or what he had done in his
image. Instead he commented: "He [Newman] would have me
declared persona non grata throughout Germany."
Newman, however, was adamant: "My portrait of Krupp,
depicting him as Satan in his own Hades - his factory -
received enthusiastic acceptance by the public, but also
Krupp's wrath. This portrait is a statement, not a record."
Less contentiously, perhaps, the fragments of Andy Warhol's
personality are shown by a cut up of his face, distortingly
shot in close-up and from below, then reassembled in a
collage of jigsaw-shaped pieces.
Newman's audience was perhaps surprisingly large and varied,
given his refusal to engage with pop-singers, film-stars,
fashion, or anything that could remotely be associated with
celebrity for its own sake. Presumably this resistance
resulted from his reiterated interest in people "with ideas,
those who create, and those who do things with their lives.
It is what they are, not who they are, that fascinates me."
Yet it was not an audience he found at the start of what
became a 57-year-long career. Born the second of three sons
to a clothing manufacturer, the family was obliged to
repeatedly move on by the exigencies of business failure and
the Depression. Following schooling mainly in Atlantic City
and Florida, Newman entered the University of Miami in 1936
to study painting. Despite a scholarship, after two years he
could no longer afford not to work, so he quit his studies
to follow a burgeoning interest in photography, at which he
hoped to make a living.
He moved to Philadelphia to work for a chain of photo
studios, and soon met up with the legendary Alexey
Brodovitch, the immensely influential picture editor of
Harper's Bazaar and professor at the Philadelphia Museum
School of Industrial Arts. Newman's day job might be making
49 cent portraits, but his spare time was spent in the
footsteps of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, seminal
photographers of the "real" (that is, poor) US, with the
Farm Security Administration, or making moody abstracts of
walls and furniture.
At the outbreak of the second world war, Newman returned to
Florida to manage the Tooley-Myron Photo-studio in West Palm
Beach; and by 1941 he had his own studio nearby. Again, he
combined taking "straight" portraits of local customers with
inventing his own cut up techniques, influenced as much by
cubism and modernism in art as by traditional photo-collage.
It was a form he adapted into the mainstream of his work in
the 1960s, particularly for ground-breaking writers and
artists with mass popularity, such as Andy Warhol, Dan
Flavin and Henry Miller.
By the 1940s, Newman had begun his "environmental
portraits", as others described them. Newman rejected this
description. He pointed out that his most reproduced image
of an artist was not of Marc Chagall or Marcel Duchamp but
was a close-up of Pablo Picasso (taken in 1954), revealing
only the artist's head with his hand on his brow.
Success was not altogether swift in coming, however. In
December 1941, New York's Museum of Modern Art put on an
exhibition called American Photographs at $10. It included
one image by each of nine photographers (who later became
household names). Newman was among them. Printed in limited
editions of 10, all proceeds from the $10 sale price were to
go directly to each photographer. By the time the show
closed, only 14 of the 90 prints were bought, three of them
by the Museum itself.
None the less, this brought Newman into working partnership
with Beaumont Newhall, himself a seminal photographer,
photography writer and teacher. In 1944 and 1946, Newhall
and his wife Nancy included Newman in historic group shows
of contemporary Americans. More exhibitions followed,
including Artists Look Like This, Artists Through the Camera
and Bravo Stravinsky.
In London, Newman created his 1979 documentation of The
Great British at the National Portrait Gallery; in
Washington it took until 1990 for Arnold Newman's Americans
to appear. In 1988, I interviewed Newman at the National
Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Yorkshire,
where he was the winner of their prize for international
photography. He took the accolade and the packed audience in
his stride: he could talk as well as he could work. No
doubt, the medal joined the dozens of awards collected since
1951 when he won Cologne's Photokina.
Newman's career coincided with the rise of the picture
magazine, and his flexibility in working in and out of
colour, with or without large format cameras (which he
alternated with 35mm) allowed him to keep pace with new
styles. From the time he installed himself in New York in
1942, Newman's portraits appeared in all the major
magazines: Life, Look, Harper's Bazaar and latterly the New
York Times, on Henry Moore, William de Kooning, Claes
Oldenburg and Alexander Calder.
To Newman, there was a clear continuity in his choice of
career, from art school to photography. Yet he was equally
clear about his use of terminology. "Those who call
themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant
egotists," he insisted. Yet he never denied the creativity
and artistry of his hugely influential medium.
He is survived by his wife Augusta, whom he married in 1949,
and his sons Eric and David.
· Arnold Newman, photographer, born March 3 1918; died June
5 2006