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Arnold Newman

Arnold Newman
By Philip Brookman, Arnold Newman

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Piet Mondrian behind his easel, Igor Stravinsky at his piano, Max Ernst sitting smoking on his throne-like chair: Arnold Newman's photographs are classics of portraiture. His subtle arrangements constituted the foundations of "environmental portraiture." His photographs integrate the respective artist's characteristic equipment and surroundings, thus indicating his or her field of activity. The enormous fame of Newman's portraits can be ascribed to their daring compositions and sometimes astounding spatial structures. The photographer's beginnings, on the other hand, were none too promising. During the Great Depression Newman had to abandon his art studies for financial reasons. Between 1938 and 1942 he concentrated on socio-documentary photography in the ghettos of West Palm Beach, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. One might think that being forced to earn his living in a photography studio would have stifled his artistic potential: Newman portrayed up to 70 clients a day. Yet he still succeeded in developing a very personal touch and establishing himself in the New York art scene of the early 1940s. His subjects included Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Alexander Calder. With his unmistakable style, Newman became the star photographer of artists, writers and musicians.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1046310 in Books
  • Published on: 2000-03-01
  • Original language: French, German, English
  • Dimensions: 5.60 pounds
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 276 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Amazon.com
There's a famous photograph of Picasso in his 70s that probably would make you think "genius" and "visionary" even if you had no idea he was a great artist. One hand pushes up against his forehead, carving a few extra wrinkles and hooding one eye; the other eye stares out with implacable intensity. This is the work of Arnold Newman, one of the great contemporary American portrait photographers, whose images--frequently made on assignment in Europe--appeared in Harper's Bazaar, Fortune, Life, Look, and other major magazines. Trained as a painter, he believes (as he writes in a short, passionate essay prefacing his selection of 60 years of his work) that "we do not take pictures with our cameras, but with our hearts and minds." He has always been fascinated by the kind of people--scientists, musicians, actors, politicians, writers, and artists--with whom he could have "long conversations until late at night."

Arnold Newman, probably the most extensive of the many samplings of the photographer's work, amply displays his vaunted skill at portraying mostly well-known sitters in their native habitats, whether these happen to be lonely-looking palaces (Haile Selassie, Generalissimo Franco), book-lined offices (Golda Meier, Stephen Jay Gould), a shabby road veiled in darkness (Shelagh Delaney), a bed (Woody Allen, scribbling on a legal pad), or mysterious precincts that capture the willful individuality of artists and architects. With 240 black-and-white and color plates, this beautifully produced book (marred only by the awkward way the elegant black silhouette of a grand piano lid in the Igor Stravinsky portrait bleeds across two pages) accompanies an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (March 18-May 21, 2000). --Cathy Curtis

Chronique amazon.fr
Après quelques images en extérieur, Arnold Newman s'est décidé très tôt pour le portrait d'artistes, d'intellectuels et d'hommes politiques, saisis en plans larges, au sein de compositions très élaborées, les unes en noir et blanc, les autres en couleur. Ses images sont devenues des classiques du portrait photographique. Le style de Newman accorde une place essentielle à l'environnement de son modèle. Le sujet est toujours décalé, repoussé sur les bords de l'image, donnant une perception de la personnalité dans son univers.

Igor Stravinsky, le bras appuyé sur un piano à queue ouvert occupant tout l'espace par ses formes géométriques, Mondrian derrière son chevalet, Eugene O'Neill, à l'entrée des coulisses d'un théâtre ou encore Picasso dans son atelier sont autant d'images connues, reconnues.

Ici sont rassemblés l'essentiel des clichés de Newman depuis les portraits de Chagall, Giacometti, Cartier-Bresson à ceux de Rabin, Arafat, Clinton et Woody Allen. Des personnages uniques saisis dans un style très personnel. Un album rien moins que remarquable sur un maître qui a donné naissance au "portrait environnemental". --Céline Darner

From Library Journal
At 82 and still actively involved in a career that has spanned 60 years, Arnold Newman has photographed many of the 20th century's leading political and cultural figures. His approach to portraiture has been to place subjects within their working or natural environments to better distinguish their personalities and creative abilities. Thus, we see artists in their studios, writers at their desks, composers seated at pianos, and presidents and prime ministers in stately settings. His images of John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Miller, and Lillian Hellman, among others, are often what come to mind when we think of these famous people. This book is compiled as part of Taschen's lavish, large-format series on prominent photographers (e.g., August Sander, LJ 7/99) and released as the catalog for a retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. It contains introductory essays by Newman and by Philip Brookman, curator and organizer of the exhibition, and features over 200 full-page black-and-white and color plates, supplemented with a detailed chronology. Well worth considering, even if your library does own pictures of many of Newman's subjects.DJoan Levin, MLS, Chicago
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.