Masterclass

Arnold Newman

Arnold Newman

william a. ewing

With a preface by Todd Brandow

and contributions by Arthur Ollman,

David Coleman and Corinne Currat

With 210 illustrations, 22 in color

Masterclass

First published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181a High Holborn, London wc1v 7qx

Masterclass: Arnold Newman copyright © 2012 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London

Preface copyright © 2012 Todd Brandow “Arnold Newman: Student” and “Arnold Newman: Master” copyright © 2012 William A. Ewing “A Photographer’s Life: Looking Back at Arnold Newman” copyright © 2012 Arthur Ollman “‘A Positive Story’: Arnold Newman’s Great American Faces” copyright © 2012 David Coleman

All photographs by Arnold Newman copyright © 2012 Getty Images /Arnold Newman

Design concept and sequencing by William A. Ewing

Biographies translated from the French by Jill Phythian

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-500-54415-0

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C O N T E N T S

notes to the reader

Unless otherwise stated, all photographic works in this publication are black-and-white silver prints.

In the plate sections, captions are minimal. For more detailed biographical information, please consult the selected biographies on pp. 257– 64.

All display quotations are by Arnold Newman, taken from an interview with curator Will Stapp; see p. 265 for further information.

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Masterclass: Arnold Newman, organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis, and curated by William A. Ewing.

Venues include: March–May 2012: C/O Berlin, Germany October 2012–January 2013: Fotomuseum Den Haag,

The Hague, Netherlands February–May 2013: Harry Ransom Center, The

University of Texas at Austin, USAJune–September 2013: San Diego Museum of Art,

San Diego, California, USA

page 2 adolph gottlieb, artist, Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1970: work print, with Arnold Newman’s instructions for the printer

page 4 Excerpt from a handwritten note by Arnold Newman, c. 1970, justifying the choice of one particular frame among a half-dozen contenders

page 5 lilli palmer, actress, New York, 1947: contact sheet

page 6 barnett newman, artist, Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1970

Preface todd brandow

Arnold Newman: Student william a. ewing

PLATES I

Arnold Newman: Master william a. ewing

PLATES II

A Photographer’s Life: Looking Back at Arnold Newman arthur ollman

PLATES III

“A Positive Story”: Arnold Newman’s Great American Faces david coleman

Selected Biographies corinne currat

Notes

Selected Exhibitions and Publications Acknowledgments

Index

10

12

24 90

110

172 184

246 257

265

268

270

271

11

arnold newman, self-portrait, Philadelphia, 1938

Prefacetodd brandow

During the second half of the twentieth century, there was no

portrait photographer as productive, creative, and successful as

Arnold Newman. For sixty-six years he applied himself to his

art and craft, never losing his appetite for experiment. He was

rewarded by the regular publication of his work in the most

influential magazines of the day. He was much interviewed,

much quoted, and much respected, accumulating no fewer

than nine honorary degrees. Several major solo exhibitions

paid homage to his achievements during his lifetime, and his

work can be found in many of the world’s most prestigious

photography collections. No historical overview or book

of iconic portraits would be complete without one or two

Newman masterpieces. Every decade or so, this industrious

photographer managed to produce another impressive book,

adding a layer of new work to the rich strata of the old. It

therefore seems reasonable to ask: Why, then, do we have need

of another book and exhibition?

Firstly, because he is no longer alive. The exhibitions were

ephemeral, of course, and are long gone; the books may be

permanent, interesting, useful—but they are hardly complete.

Newman was, as the saying goes, a control freak, and it was

next to impossible for a museum director or a curator to prevail

in the choice of what was to be included or excluded. Strangely,

Newman was ultraconservative in his editing: Hundreds of

quite marvelous portraits were excluded on the grounds that

the sitter was not important enough, or had faded from public

consciousness. His businessmen, bankers and leaders of industry

were often a match for his painters, writers and musicians, but

they are rarely seen in his books. His strong group portraits

are virtually never included, and as for his abstractions,

architectural details and cityscapes, these are sadly few and

far between. A posthumous retrospective is a real occasion for

a reappraisal.

Moreover, the rich archive of Arnold Newman “raw

materials” at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center

had yet to be adequately examined. Luckily for us, Newman

was a highly efficient manager and archivist (though who can say

how he would have fared without his dedicated wife, Augusta,

at his side), and he kept accurate records of every one of his

sittings. Exhibition prints, work prints, reference prints, contact

prints, negatives—they are all preserved: We know when each

print was made, and for whom. His contact sheets bear the

traces of his decisions: to cut out this minute detail by cropping

two millimeters on the left, to cut that tiny sliver of sky by

three millimeters off the top… Today appreciative curators

can pore over the contact sheets at the Harry Ransom Center,

following frame by frame Newman’s relentless pursuit of the

“perfect” picture. Our retrospective has benefited immensely

from such study.

Newman was a great teacher, and he loved sharing his

knowledge. He was blunt but direct, mitigating tough criticism

with good-natured banter. He had principles in which he

deeply believed, and he seems to have known how to impart

them. Thankfully he gave many interviews, which have been

transcribed, and what he had to say was consistent in its

essentials from the first to the last. It was these “lessons” that

led us to the concept of “Masterclass”; the idea that, even

posthumously, Arnold Newman could go on teaching all of us

—whether connoisseurs or neophytes—a great deal.

1312

“I came to New York on a train and I saw the skyline of Manhattan

across the flats, and I knew it was the right time … in 1941.

And I didn’t know anybody.”

—Arnold Newman

When Arnold Newman began his life’s work in that same

year—1941—portrait photography was almost precisely one

hundred years old. Photography had essentially begun as portrait

photography, for reasons easy to understand: To people seeing a

photograph for the first time in their lives, a photographic likeness

was a truly incredible thing. People spoke of a “magic mirror,”

a “mirror with a memory,” and “a mirror of nature,” and there

was something truly amazing about a mirror that could capture

one’s image and freeze it for posterity. Moreover, real mirrors,

at least ones of high quality, were still relatively rare in 1839, so

many people holding a daguerreotype in their hands were seeing

themselves with a clarity they had never before witnessed.1 Some

could not even recognize their own faces: The great nineteenth-

century portraitist Nadar tells us that clients occasionally left his

studio perfectly satisfied with their portraits—that is, before the

photographer had to run after them and explain that they’d been

handed someone else’s portrait in error!2 (Nadar also observed

that “the response of almost everyone else, on seeing themselves

photographed for the first time, was disapproval and recoil.”)3

Another contemporary source noted that there was a healthy

business in wilfully selling people portraits of someone else, “on

the assumption that, with few mirrors around, there were many

people who did not know what they looked like.” 4

This fascination with one’s own likeness meant that other uses

of the new medium—landscape, architecture, documentation,

scientific applications, artistic expression, and so on—were

decidedly of lesser attraction. Right across the social spectrum the

first priority was to see how one looked. Just as one turns a mirror One of Arnold Newman’s early darkrooms, 1940

Arnold Newman: Studentwilliam a. ewing

1514

this way and that to get a rounded view, so photographers were

obliged to photograph their clients from every angle. Already by

1850 a photographer could joke, “Every possible view of the face

has been tried. Our only chance of pleasing now is by trying a

portrait in which the face will be entirely absent.” 5 With the

new medium, there was also the hope of glimpsing something

hitherto secret: The daguerreotypist in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s

The House of Seven Gables, written in 1851, claims that his camera

“brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter

could ever venture upon.” 6 It was a widely shared view.

For the first hundred years, however, with rare exceptions,

how one looked meant how one was supposed to look:

Photographic portraits were both stiff and rigidly formulaic.

Conformity was prized; individuality and eccentricity were

discouraged. For the first fifty of those years, portraits were

made almost exclusively by professionals in studios, which

meant a reliance on standard commercial props and backdrops.

Exposure times, though growing shorter and shorter every

year, required posing without movement, which was easiest

done sitting down. So common was the position that one

exasperated critic of 1890 wondered how “ladies and gentlemen

alike are yet wholly unable to maintain that erect position which

is supposed to be the privilege of humanity.” 7 Unlike today,

when the expression of individuality is paramount and the face

is therefore dominant, early portraits privileged the full figure

and in proportion faces appeared minuscule. Clothing was an

indicator of social status, as were “gentlemanly” or “ladylike”

poses versus the artless postures of working men and women.

As for the professional backdrops used in most studios catering

to the bourgeoisie, like the “view of gardens such as might have

belonged to the château of a French marquis,” our critic of 1890

comments sarcastically, “What can a man desire more?”8

However, the constraints and pretensions found in the

professional studio did not affect the rapidly growing class of

amateurs, who late in the century began to take photography—

literally—into their own hands. Their “portraits” were more

spontaneous and personal, and, in a sense, more credible, which

posed an existential threat to the hide-bound professionals.

Happily for the latter, formal portraits continued to be required

in many areas of social life, and as professionals had livelihoods

to protect, along with substantial investments in equipment,

labor and premises, stressing the artlessness of their amateur

competitors was shrewd strategy. They knew that their

clients wanted portraits that did not look like something they

themselves could do at home. Sitters wanted “art” for their

money, and the great “temples” of photography that graced

metropolitan boulevards and even the “photographer-barbers”

or “photographer-beersellers” of the backstreets were happy to

provide some trappings of it.9

This is not to say that the portrait didn’t evolve; technical

advances would make change inevitable. The making of a

portrait in the darkroom at the end of the nineteenth century

was a very different thing from what it had been in mid-

century. But generally speaking (and excepting the rich vein

of experimentation in the amateur domain),10 there were no

radical departures in the taking of portraits until well into the

twentieth century. In its essence, the professional’s approach

of 1940 was not very different from what had been done in

the studio fifty or even a hundred years earlier. And it was in

just such an enterprise that Arnold Newman embarked on his

remarkable career.

Newman would learn all about professional studio

photography from the inside out, one might say—the

mechanics, the economics, the logistics, and the psychology.

His first serious jobs were in portrait studios that cranked out

standard fare at rock-bottom prices and absolutely discouraged

innovation. At up to seventy portraits a day, there was no room

for experimentation. (Once forgetting this, he suggested that

a family group be lit “in the manner of a Frans Hals,” only to

be chastised by his boss: “Don’t try to be an artist, just take the

pictures the way we tell you.” )11 So monotonous was the work,

particularly the laborious retouching of pimples and wrinkles,

that one might have expected the young photographer to turn

his back forever on portraiture. Fortunately, it would eventually

have the opposite effect, convincing him to make portraits the

way he thought they should be made. But before Newman came

to that decision, as with most young artists, his path would

meander for a while, with vigorous curiosity as his guide.

Newman had originally planned to become a painter, but

had to give up art school when family fortunes deteriorated.

He had imagined keeping his painting up in the evenings,

but little by little photography supplanted these attempts.

At lunchtime he began to train his borrowed camera on street

scenes close to the studio; on weekends he roamed further

afield. Luckily, he fell in with a group of young photographers

who were passionate for their medium, and he tagged along

as they roamed the streets of Philadelphia in the night. Many

years later one of them, Louis Faurer, baptized the group “The

Philadelphia School,” which in retrospect seems a little grandiose

for the reality, but does communicate a sense of a shared credo.

Its “members,” to varying degrees, would go on to leave quite

an imprint on twentieth-century American photography.

Ted Croner, Irving Penn, Sol Mednick, Izzy Posoff,

Ben Rose, and Ben Somoroff shared an admiration of the

great Russian émigré art director Alexey Brodovitch, whose

Philadelphia design/photography workshop had become a beacon

for aspiring photographers and art directors.12 For Newman,

the fellowship represented a questioning, liberal, photographic

education far removed from the stultifying environment of the

commercial studio. Nevertheless, he was still pragmatic enough

to turn those confines to his advantage, negotiating with his

boss the right to use the darkroom after hours.

All in all, Newman’s work for various studios in

Philadelphia, Baltimore, Allentown, and West Palm Beach

lasted for a period of several years, during which he learned

everything that could possibly be learned in the darkroom—

“a blessing in disguise”—while his every free moment was

given to experimentation with documentary photography,

largely inspired by the gritty work of the Farm Security

Administration, and the perusing of books in the public

library.13 Newman later recalled a formative moment when

he chanced upon two pictures of Teddy Roosevelt in a book.

One was a stiff official portrait, while the other showed him

“with a foot on a rhino he’d just shot … grinning like hell,

his hands on his hip with a gun.” Newman was impressed by

the stark contrast: “… suddenly the man came alive. I knew

the pictures I wanted to do.”

In fact, Newman didn’t have much knowledge of the history

of photographic portraiture when he consciously started out on

his own, for the simple reason that such an account had only

“ I was thrown to the wolves.

The next person would come in,

smile, Bam! Next, smile, Bam!

… and out… I had to learn very

quickly how to adapt to people,

how to get them to adjust to

the camera. But the experience

was fantastic!”

1716

been sketchily written. (He was particularly testy later in life

when a critic proclaimed that the great German portraitist,

August Sander, had been “the father of us all.” Newman

protested that no one in 1940s America had the remotest idea of

who Sander was. This was true: Sanders’s celebrity in America

was to come much later.)14 But this did not mean Newman

lacked respect for the predecessors he did know about. His

personal collection is telling in this regard: In it there were

a good number of American daguerreotypes. Their subjects,

paragons of stiff rectitude, had absolutely nothing in common

with Newman’s comfortable sitters (or so they seem), nor with

the style of realism he would pioneer—but the fact that he

acquired and preserved these relics is evidence that he still saw

his own work rooted in a great historical tradition.

The young Newman made a point of familiarizing himself

with portraiture of the past. He traveled to New York’s

Museum of Modern Art to ask guidance from curator Beaumont

Newhall. With his Philadelphian friends he talked of past

greats appreciatively, even sometimes ecstatically, as in the

case of Alvin Langdon Coburn: “… that Coburn portrait of

Ezra Pound, I can’t forget him!” He discovered the work of

Julia Margaret Cameron, Peter Henry Emerson and Henry

Peach Robinson, whose composited allegories appealed to the

craftsman in Newman despite their moralizing kitsch.

A keen reader of illustrated magazines such as Harper’s

Bazaar and Vanity Fair, Newman cut out portraits by artist-

photographers including Lusha Nelson, George Platt Lynes,

Cecil Beaton, Erwin Blumenfeld, George Hoyningen-Huene,

and Horst P. Horst. Of Edward Steichen and Man Ray in

particular, he acknowledged, “They opened my eyes.” That

Steichen was also highly paid did not go unnoticed by the

aspiring photographer. For someone who never lost his feelings

of financial insecurity, it was no small consolation to see

that a portrait photographer could become the highest paid

photographer in the world.

Still, Newman concluded that Steichen and his kind were

not doing what he wanted to do: They photographed artists,

or their studios, but seldom the artist in the studio. Such

photographs missed a vital dimension in Newman’s eyes; there

was “no conscious effort to show where they lived, where they

worked, no conscious effort to bring it together into a creative

whole … to make it say something as well as being a visual

hold.” With only a close-up of a face or a head, “you are not

saying a bloody thing except showing what a man or woman

looked like… But every artist is a different human being,

a different kind of person, a different kind of personality, a

different kind of psyche, and all this the photographer should

reflect.”15 Looking through portraiture of the past, one does

find photographs of artists in their studios: Hoyningen-Huene’s

pictures of Calder and his circus; Steichen’s pictures of Rodin

or Brancusi among their sculptures, and so on. The turn-of-

the-century work of Lewis Hine also bears mention: Hine’s

portraits were always contextual, or environmental, in ways

that evoke the Newman approach. Still, the Hines weren’t about

exceptional individuals, as the Newmans were; they were about

ordinary human beings—mostly children—trapped in the roles

into which society had slotted them (a miner, a factory worker,

a newsboy, etc.). Hine’s subjects were types, not sitters; strictly

speaking, the photographs were documents, not portraits. As

for Sander, who, like Hine, showed his subjects in context,

“artists” were only one of seven sections of his life’s work.16

Newman was right in concluding that none of his predecessors

had adopted the approach he had in mind, systematically and

profoundly, as he now resolved to carry it out.

He had managed to achieve two years’ study of art at the

University of Miami before his family’s financial problems

forced him into the working world, but, whether in school

or out, he was determined to make up his own mind about

what art he liked and which directions he wished to pursue.

In 1938 he wrote a letter to Life magazine, commenting on

an article they had run on abstract art. While other readers

wrote indignantly of Georges Braque’s “products of insanity,”

or said they preferred Mae West to “horrid things like these,”

Newman enthused: “For the past two years I have been studying

art … and not until your May 2nd issue could I admit that I saw

anything in abstract art. The clear and basic manner in which

you presented your material deserves real credit.”17 The Life

editors could not have known that the young man would be

contributing his own art to the magazine in a “clear and basic

manner” within a decade.18

This critical attitude extended to people. Newman was fond

of saying that he had been brought up in the hotel business, by

which he implied that he had encountered a wide spectrum of

humanity in those transient places, and had developed a pretty

shrewd grasp of human nature. He wasn’t going to be taken in

by impeccable reputations, nor by impressive first appearances.

No wonder, then, that his favorite form of reading was

biography. “If I hadn’t become an artist,” he would tell friends,

“I’d have become a psychiatrist.”

Newman was often called the father of “environmental

portraiture,” meaning that he would usually situate the person

in their library, living room, laboratory, studio or office.19 But

he himself was never comfortable with the term (which is just

as well, since today its ecological connotations ring jarringly in

our ears). He thought the “environmental” label did not give

enough credit to what he termed his “symbolic portraits,” such

as his famous study of Igor Stravinsky (pp. 134–35)—hardly

“environmental,” as it was made in a borrowed space with a

borrowed piano. Newman also complained that the label was

simply too restrictive: “People started calling me the father of

the environmental portrait,” he explained, “[but] the moment

you put a label on something there is no room to move. And I

never thought in such terms, and I refuse to think in terms of

labels…” Sometimes, for example, he homed in on a sitter’s

head or face, or face and hands, to the exclusion of everything

else (see pp. 138 or 187). There were also collaged portraits,

made from torn fragments of several different portraits (see

pp. 176 or 241), which were fictions, something between

the environmental and the symbolic. “It’s whatever the hell

you want to call it,” he once said with exasperation. “I’m just

looking for each time to go on out there and find a new way of

expressing it, for the fun of it.” Yet there was a grain of truth in

the adjective “environmental.” The majority of his portraits did

show people in their usual settings, and even if Stravinsky was

sitting at a borrowed piano, the instrument was still a very real

part of his world.

There is a certain irony in Newman’s reputation as, first

and foremost, a photographer of artists. To hear Newman, it

seems as if necessity was the mother of invention. “Who else

did I know? Who else did I know about? ” he admitted. But

Daguerreotype from Arnold Newman’s personal collection: anonymous photographer and subject, date unknown

1918

while he had respect for everyone he photographed (though

the “respect” he had for the industrialist and arms dealer

Alfried Krupp was of a different order), visual artists were his

heroes, and throughout his long career he never passed up an

opportunity to photograph them. And he certainly did “know

about them” early on, as a letter he sent to a friend in 1943 tells

us. On the walls of his room he had hung “a Léger, a Stuart

Davis, a Jacques Lipchitz drawing, a Julien Levy watercolor,

a Raphael Soyer painting and one Moses Soyer, a Max Ernst

drawing, a Kuniyoshi print, a John Groth painting, a Chagall

self-portrait, and original photographs by Atget, Abbott, Levitt,

with two stinking schlemells by Rose and Newman.” Those

self-deprecating remarks about his own work, and that of his

best friend, photographer Ben Rose, also reveal something

interesting—that he saw Rose and himself as the equals of

the others, or at least as worthy of their company. In his book

Faces: A Narrative History of the Portrait in Photography, author Ben

Maddow summed up Newman’s oeuvre (in 1977, when the

photographer still had many years before him) as the product

of “a brilliant and very twentieth-century mind.”20 No better

evidence of this open, intelligent mind could be given than

that letter’s list of artists and artworks revealed. Later in life

Newman would note that “great artists have always understood,

appreciated and allied themselves with photography, long before

the general public.”21 It was his way of reminding people that

his chosen medium was, indeed, a fine art.

Newman never lacked for good teachers among his

friends and acquaintances. One remarkable person was the

suave Morris Berd, a Philadelphia painter who taught him how

to look profoundly at any accomplished work of art. “‘Look

at this, Arnold,’ he said of a Walker Evans street scene. ‘See

the way this line works … this shadow falls and goes … and

this picture, the line comes this way … or the light across the

texture of this building with the store front with the flaps in

front of it…’ And he began to open my eyes to not so much the

light but how to look for it, and more importantly you could

anticipate it, and wait for it, and put it together…”

Ben Rose also expanded Newman’s horizons, showing

him how styles of art evolved: “Ben said, ‘Well, you take a

mountain, this huge mountain, and somebody will make a very

beautiful line that goes across maybe another line of the lower

›› Booklet of contact prints sent by Arnold Newman to his friend Milton Wiener, c. 1940. Note the early fascination with abstraction and the torn image, themes to which Newman would return throughout his career.

2120

hill … the next artist will come and do a monumental painting

showing this huge bulk, this massive shape, and just almost

abstract … and the next guy will come and do a very realistic

mountain, but with impressionistic lines, and the next guy will

come and use the texture of the mountain as a take-off and the

texture of the clouds, and flatten it out’ … and suddenly in just a

few moments he opened up my eyes and I could see modern art!”

Rose had particularly benefited from his close association with

Brodovitch, who had constantly pushed for originality, the taking

of risks, and the innovation that results from sheer accident.22

Newman also learned a lesson from another of Brodovitch’s

collaborators, Erwin Blumenfeld, who was rapidly becoming

one of fashion photography’s masters. Newman had gone to

Blumenfeld’s studio in search of a job, and one was duly offered,

but astonishingly Blumenfeld advised Newman not to take it—he

would be better off remaining independent. (The older man may

have been ruing his own loss of freedom: Having begun as a free-

spirited Dadaist, he had found himself trapped in a lucrative but

spiritually vapid profession.)23 Newman recognized the potential

loss of independence, and took Blumenfeld’s advice.

Newman’s friend, Milton Wiener, who would go on to

become a brilliant art director in the advertising industry, also

noticed the impressive intellect described by Maddow. Wiener

had asked for and received a rough little booklet of Newman’s

pictures, and set about offering criticism and encouragement (see

pp. 19, 20, 21, and opposite).24 “A swell Miro painting,” he wrote

next to a clever abstraction. Another bears the annotation, “Not

as good as the others,” and yet another, “You can do better.” But

these criticisms were followed by a clear vote of confidence in

the work, as one picture is suggested as “a good cover for a spiral

bound book of your best photos.” The ultimate accolade comes

on the final page: “Arnold, I would very much like to have prints

of the ones I’ve checked.” Assuming his friend delivered, Wiener

would be among the first of many highly appreciative collectors.

The main thrust of the booklet is architectural abstraction—

only one portrait makes an appearance—but, perhaps as a result

of these explorations of abstraction and still life, the backgrounds

of Newman’s portraits would never be secondary aspects of his

compositions, nor accepted uncritically as givens. From the day

Newman decided to devote himself to portraiture, his work

would have a masterful command of both sitter and setting.

› Booklet of contact prints sent by Arnold Newman to his friend Milton Wiener, c. 1940. The only portrait in the booklet shows the formal rigor that Newman would develop.

2322