Do you recall the old joke about Sam, the man who claimed to know everybody? To prove this to a doubting friend, Sam appears on a Vatican balcony with the Pope. A bystander comes up to the friend and says, ”Who`s that up on the balcony with Sam?”
Sam lives. He is of course the world famous Life magazine photographer Arnold Newman, and few are the great names and memorable faces of this century who have escaped his lens.
An exhibition of his works recently opened at the capital`s National Portrait Gallery-101 uniquely Newman portraits of celebrated folk as diverse as they are luminous: Dr. Seuss, the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Willem de Kooning, Ayn Rand, Robert Frost, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gypsy Rose Lee, Diana Vreeland, Georgia O`Keeffe, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, Dr. Edward Teller and a pictorial Who`s Who beyond.
There`s even one of John F. Kennedy in 1953, a senator so junior and obscure that many people who saw the two of them setting up a photo shoot in the Capitol recognized only Newman.
”We walked around for about two hours,” Newman recalled to a visitor at his exhibition shortly before it opened. ”I was really attracted to this guy. He was a real man. We had some serious moments and we kibbitzed around a lot, but nobody paid much attention. He was known only for dating all the pretty girls of Washington back then and he was not much in the public eye. I think as many people said hello to me as to him.”
Described as ”one of modern photography`s consummate portraitists,”
Newman, now 74, is known for much more than the fame of his subjects, though that distinction is considerable. As Dr. Marvin Goldberger, director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, observed to Newman during a recent conversation: ”Arnold, you have photographed just about everybody who has been involved with the atomic bomb.”
A onetime painter and art student whose radical, abstract photographs won him the patronage of the Museum of Modern Art and the great Alfred Stieglitz when he was just 23, Newman is acclaimed for having pioneered the
”environmental” approach to portraiture-placing his subjects within a biographical context evocative not only of their personality but their life`s work.
Newman`s is a relaxed and natural approach, though he relentlessly seeks the right setting, framing and juxtaposition with associative objects to project his subject`s life and image.
His 1946 portrait of composer Igor Stravinsky is dominated by the bold, stark silhouette of the raised lid of a grand piano. The composer himself, seated at the unseen keyboard, occupies only the lower left-hand corner of the rectangular composition.
”I was criticized for that,” Newman said. ”But photography is space! I always tell them, `I`ve read the Old Testament. I`ve looked in the New Testament. And I`ve read the Koran and other religious books. And I`ve never seen any rules or regulations about how to do photographs.”
His 1942 portrait of abstract artist Piet Mondrian resembles a Mondrian painting. The spare, bespectacled, balding painter is seated next to a tall easel, his hand draped over the bottom of the stand. Just behind his head are two black rectangles thumb-tacked to the wall. His head and hand appear spherical, but otherwise the composition is all vertical and horizontal lines. ”It was there! It was there!,” the effusive Newman said of the photo, while leading his visitor on a private tour of the exhibition. ”I went to this tiny little apartment he had in New York. He couldn`t sell his art-not for $250 or even less. And yet he changed the whole form of art, of design, of architecture. I took a look and thought, it`s there. I think I moved this easel here maybe two inches. I said, `Would you mind sitting down behind the easel?` He did-sort of draping his hand over.”
Some try to associate Newman with slick, modern-day photographers like Annie Liebovitz, who suspends her subjects from tree limbs, paints their faces blue, partially submerges them in milk baths and uses other artifices to embellish her portraits.
Newman strongly resists such comparisons.
”I don`t do tricks! I don`t do tricks!,” he said. ”The picture is there. Ansel Adams said, `We all see the same things. We all interpret it differently.` This bloody photograph I did of (painter) Francis Bacon. I walked in and, My God, there was this one light bulb. He was craning his head toward a skylight just like one of his paintings. I said, `Don`t move! Don`t move!` And the light was just right on his face. It was there. The art of photography is one of seeing things.”
Newman did a chaotic picture of painter Jackson Pollack for Life magazine in which the violently creative abstractionist is seen in a dark, shabby room with myriad paint cans and artistic litter all around him.
”He was dead broke and I was dead broke,” Newman recalled. ”He said,
`I need the bread. Buy one of my paintings.` He wanted $125. I said, `I`m getting married in a month.` ” I had $400 in the bank. How could I buy a painting? The thing is worth $2 million or $3 million today. But I got this picture-all that was there. I think I pushed one of the paint cans three inches.”
A teenager during the Depression, Newman helped his family run its small hotel in Miami Beach while attending art classes at the University of Miami. Dropping out after two years, he worked for a time doing ”49-cent portraits” for a cheap department store in Philadelphia, then later returned to Florida to establish his own studio in West Palm Beach.
In 1941, his work caught the attention of the Museum of Modern Art`s Beaumont Newhall, who bought a number of his pictures and exhibited them. He also sent Newman to arts impresario and photographer Stieglitz, who became a mentor and patron. Newman got his first magazine assignment-from Harper`s Bazaar-in 1942 at the age of 24.
”I started at the top,” he said. ”I was lucky.”
In 1949, he married ”this beautiful girl who lived in Hell`s Kitchen,”
Augusta Rubenstein, now his wife of 43 years. ”She didn`t want to be a model; she wanted to be a mother.”
There`s a 1943 double portrait of Stieglitz and wife Georgia O`Keeffe in the exhibition-he, very old, standing and staring at the camera; she, in memorable profile, seated and gazing down and to the side.
”I call it `Together, but Apart`-each going their own way. At the time, she was very stiff. There`s another picture here I did of her 30 years later in New Mexico. I spent two days with her and we had so much fun together. I said, `O`Keeffe, you really like to play the impossible person-the
unapproachable ogre. That`s just to keep the boors away, isn`t it?` She started to laugh.”
One of his earliest pictures is of an old, ailing Eugene O`Neill, the playwright caught in an unsuspecting, vulnerable moment in his Upper East Side penthouse. He liked O`Neill a lot better than architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whom he was sent to photograph at his Wisconsin studio-office and retreat.
”I got this one,” Newman said, pointing to a rather formal study of Wright rather imperiously posed before an immense drawing of one of his futuristic projects, ”and a few others in half an hour. Just as I was really getting into it, Wright said, `I`ll be back in a minute,` and off he ran.
”I`m waiting and I`m waiting and I`m waiting, the best part of an hour. He doesn`t show up so I start wandering around his rambling building and I find him back in an office, sitting on what looked to be a throne, with a whole bunch of grown men sitting on the floor at his feet. The great man, up on a throne, playing God.
”He looked up and said, `I`ll be with you in a few minutes.` I turned to my assistant and said, `Come on, let`s get the hell out of here.` ”
Beautiful, glamorous women often found themselves in Newman`s lens. His 1945 full-length portrait of dancer Gypsy Rose Lee shows her reclining elegantly on a divan before a wall covered with modern paintings and drawings. ”A great girl,” Newman said. ”One of those women who are very brilliant, as well as beautiful. She had some really great art. She did what most great collectors do-she bought what she loved.”
Newman once had a date with Marilyn Monroe, taking her to a Los Angeles dinner party in honor of Carl Sandburg, with whom he was working on a Lincoln book. It was in 1962, the year she was working on her last, never-finished film, ”Something`s Got to Give.” The picture he took of her that night is in the exhibition.
One of his favorite portraits is of musical comedy star Zero Mostel, seen sitting in his New York art studio.
”He always thought of himself as a painter who had to earn a living in the theater,” Newman said.
On a 1953 assignment for Holiday Magazine, Newman took portraits of the young U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy.
Years later, while he was taking photos of President Kennedy on the White House lawn for Life magazine, Kennedy asked him: ”Whatever happened to that first portrait you took of me, Arnold?”
”I thought I`d get a real yak and said, `Well, Mr. President, I photographed 15 senators, and they only had room for 14, so they dropped the one least likely to succeed.` I thought he had a great sense of humor. I thought he`d absolutely laugh. His face went rigid. He said, `Thank you, Arnold,` and turned and walked back to the Oval Office. One of the Secret Service gave me one of those `how could you be so stupid?` looks.
”We very shakily got our equipment together. I was very upset, because I thought we`d get a big yak. I really felt like crawling under the grass. So I fought my way into (Press Secretary) Pierre Salinger`s office. I`d known him for years. I told him what had happened, how I`d upset the president, but Pierre just smiled.
” `He`s been telling that story all over the West Wing,` Salinger said.
`He thinks it`s really funny. If he looked upset, he`s just ribbing you.`
”
