This magnificent volume celebrates the half-century mark in the career of America's most popular living artist. Here, for the first time in one book, one can see the full depth and range of the art of LeRoy Neiman: his homages to the Old Masters; his rendering of urban life,the sporting life, the high life of cafes, discos, and cocktails,and the leisure life in the resorts of Europe and America. Also included is an impressive array of portraits of people in the public eye.

This magnificent volume celebrates the half-century mark in the career of America's most popular living artist. Here, for the first time in one book, one can see the full depth and range of the art of LeRoy Neiman: his homages to the Old Masters; his rendering of urban life,the sporting life, the high life of cafes, discos, and cocktails,and the leisure life in the resorts of Europe and America. Also included is an impressive array of portraits of people in the public eye. Here through the vision of LeRoy Neiman is the whole panoply of the icons and entertainments of our time. More than 330 color plates--the most in-depth look at the work of LeRoy Neiman to date--show the rich variety of his subject matter, the evolution and continuities of his style, and offer a stunning portrait of modern life in postwar America.

Emerging in the early 1950s in Chicago, Neiman brought to his art the painterliness of Abstract Expressionism combined with sharp, incisive renderings. The artists he mingled with were the great jazz artists: Armstrong and Fitzgerald, Mingus and Davis--and his portraits of them are profound. He rendered the gritty world of Chicago night life and hooked up with Hugh Hefner as the Playboy Empire rose. There is a frank, nonchalant eroticism in his paintings and drawings of Bunnies, poolside vixens, and Las Vegas showgirls. And as his career flourished he traveled the jet set circuit and depicted urban sophisticates,cafe society, the celebrity parade, and cocktail culture.Indeed, Neiman's best work may well be in his vision of the high life: the bars, cafes, restaurants, clubs, discos, casinos,and resorts, as well as the great cities of the world: London,Paris, New York, Venice, Moscow, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.

Of course, he is perhaps most famous for his stunning images and almost encyclopedic depiction of sports, including memorable portraits of the great athletes of our time,from Muhammad Ali to Roy Jones, Jr., from Miekey Mantle to Barry Bonds, from Arnold Palmer to Tiger Woods,from Wilt Chamberlain to Michael Jordan, from Nadia Comaneei to the Williams Sisters. In attendance at many of the great sporting events, LeRoy Neiman brings to his images of sport the immediacy and the passion of first-hand experience.

Wherever he goes he works, almost irresistibly--from making a sketch of a surly Lenny Bruce at the Playboy Mansion in the early 1960s to a recent full-fledged pottrait study of Fidel Castro as statesman par excellence in Havana. His portraits--many spontaneous, unposed,seized at public events--offer character studies of people across the spectrum of public life. A wealth of drawings will confirm LeRoy Neiman is a master draftsman.

LeRoy Neiman has captured that strange, uneasy blend of elegance and tawdriness, of the authentic and the artificial, of the meritorious and the meretricious that is the convoluted spectacle of contempora ry life.