Arnold Newman, the master photographer who expanded the boundaries of conventional portraiture by adding an environmental framework, died Tuesday in New York City. He was 88.
He died of a heart attack at Mt. Sinai Hospital, where he had been recovering from a stroke.
In a career that began in the 1930s, Mr. Newman photographed most of the great celebrities of the 20th Century. Working as a freelancer–most notably for the magazines Life, Holiday and Harper’s Bazaar–he made memorable photographs of Pablo Picasso, Harry Truman, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mantle and Carl Sandburg.
But his enduring gift to portraiture was his notion that a subject’s environment could illuminate character and enhance the finished photograph.
“It began as an idea,” Mr. Newman once commented in ARTnews. “I wanted to do something different–I wanted to go into somebody’s office or studio and photograph them in their milieu, to see the whole thing either realistically or symbolically reflecting their character and what they did in life.”
One of his best-known works, a photograph of composer Igor Stravinsky sitting at a piano, is a prime example of his idea coming to fruition. Much of the photograph is the geometric form of the piano’s kidney-shaped sounding board. The image of the composer in the left-hand corner of the photo feels quite small in comparison. It is as if the musical instrument is overpowering him.
Born in 1918 in New York City, Mr. Newman had an early interest in art, studying drawing and painting from the age of 12. Later he enrolled at the University of Miami as an art student. His early paintings and drawings were influenced by the work of the 20th Century realist painters of the Ashcan School.
Forced by the economics of the Depression to leave school, Mr. Newman found a job as an assistant at a photography studio in Philadelphia. Before long, he began to spend more of his free time with a camera rather than an easel.
In 1941, he showed his work to the great photographer Alfred Stieglitz and to Beaumont Newhall, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Stieglitz was supportive of Mr. Newman’s portfolio, and Newhall helped the young photographer get his first gallery show in Manhattan.
By 1946, Mr. Newman had taken up the life of a freelance photographer in New York. His career was given a boost when The New York Times printed some of his work. Then Life magazine hired him.
One of his first assignments for Harper’s Bazaar was the famous Stravinsky image. But Alexey Brodovitch, the magazine’s art director, rejected the image, a decision he later regretted.
While working for Life, Mr. Newman made one of his most memorable images, of the German industrialist and war criminal Alfred Krupp.
“I had him lean into the light to make him look like the devil,” the photographer recalled in an interview with the Washington Post.
“When he saw the photos he said he’d have me declared persona non grata in Germany.”
Over the succeeding decades Mr. Newman’s stature in photography grew. His body of work includes the official presidential portrait of Lyndon B. Johnson and various images of Monroe, whom he later described as “the saddest woman I ever knew. I think she was petrified of growing old.”
