LeRoy Neiman
Painted the Olympics, the Super Bowl and Ali in electric colour, and was Playboy's house artist for half a century.
LeRoy Neiman was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1921, served in the army in Europe, and studied in Chicago, where he met Hugh Hefner and began an association with Playboy that lasted more than fifty years and produced the Femlin. He became the best-known sports artist in America: official painter at five Olympic Games, courtside and ringside for Ali, computer-assisted live sketching on network television during the Super Bowl. The style is unmistakable and was widely disparaged by critics — enormous, saturated, high-velocity colour applied with a palette knife.
This is a print market almost entirely. Neiman published serigraphs in very large editions, frequently of two hundred and fifty to five hundred, over four decades, and they are extremely plentiful; sellers routinely overestimate them, and edition size, subject and condition are what separate one from another. Original oils and acrylics on canvas or board are far scarcer and sit well above the prints. Reproductions, posters and unsigned open editions circulate in enormous quantities and are commonly offered as limited work.
If you own a work by LeRoy Neiman
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.