American Modern Figurative Prints

George Josimovich, Untitled (Harbor with Sailboats) ', linocut, 1923, edition 35. Signed, dated, and annotated '4/35' in pencil. Initialed 'G J' in ...

'Plat-eye' stories are folktales told by African-Americans, particularly in the coastal Gullah areas of Georgia and South Carolina. Typically the plat-eye is an evil spirit who wasn...

Wall Street. 1904. Etching. Wuerth 344. 11 3/4 x 7 7/16 (sheet 15 1/2 x 10 1/4). Edition about 75. A rich, tonal impression printed on Japanese mulberry paper. Signed in pencil. Hous...

Original vintage poster Algeciras Feria 1948 vintage Spanish travel poster. Archival linen backed in very fine condition, ready to frame. N...

Stevan Dohanos was an accomplished draftsman who work was widely known through the Saturday Evening Post. This print 'Backyard,' however, leaves aside the illustrative magazine work ...

Japanese born, Fugi Nakamizo came to New York City in 1910. He studied at the Art Students League and Cooper Union, NYC, and also printmaking with Joseph Pennell. He worked on the Federal Public Works of Art Project in the 1930s and in the 40s, during WWII, was interned at the Japanese-American internment camp in Topaz, Utah. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NYC, and the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. This etching of New York...

'Indian with Bow in Fox Costume' is a vintage 1934 WPA era modernist color serigraph/silkscreen print by New Mexico artist, Hilaire Hiler (1898-1966) depicting a Native American figure with stylized feather headdress and Bow in black and red with white. Pencil signed by the artist in the lower right margin. Presented in a custom frame with all archival materials and UV protectant glass, outer dimensions measure 17 ½ x 15 x 1 ½ inches. Image size is 10 x 7 inches (sight). Expedited and International shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Hilaire Hiler was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was raised in Providence, Rhode Island. Hiler took art classes as a child at the Rhode Island School of Design. When he was older, Hiler studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art, Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, and William Server's studio. He also studied at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Denver, Golden State University, and National College in Ontario, Canada. He continued on to France, studying at the University of Paris in 1919. Hiler lived in Paris from 1919-1934, supporting himself as a jazz musician and a piano player for The Jockey Club. Hiler moved back to America in 1934, settling in San Francisco. He was commissioned by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to paint murals in the Aquatic Park...

Dan Burne Jones is widely know as the author of the Rockwell Kent print catalogue raisonne. It's so interesting to see that he is a gifted wood engraver as well. Jones's own prints a...

Bailey's Beach (Newport, Rhode Island). c. 1931-1933. Etching and drypoint. Hausberg catalog 126 state vi. Edition 75. 6 x 7 7/8 (sheet 9 9/16 x 12 1/2). Printed on cream wove paper ...

Philadelphia-born Irving Guyer attended the Art Students League and worked in New York City before moving to California. This print is signed and titled i...

CHARLES BANKS WILSON (American 1918 - 2013) COMANCHE PORTRAIT, c. 1941 Lithograph signed in pencil. Edition 250 as published by Associated Artists. 10 1/4 x 14 1/2 inches. Sheet, 1...

Original French antique vintage poster: RIBET DESJARDINS. Professional acid-free archival linen backed, very good condition. Ready to fram...

Bernard Brussel-Smith, 'City Scene I', wood engraving, 1949, edition 100. Signed, titled, and numbered '93/100' in pencil. A superb, richly-inked impression, on white wove paper, wi...

"History of Detroit" is in the style of a mural by the master muralist from the city of Detroit, Hubert Massey. It renders in dramatic composition the ov...

George Josimovich, 'Commuters', linocut, 1922-23, edition 20. Signed, dated '22, titled, and annotated '9/20' in pencil. Initialed in the block 'G.J....

The Box at 'Faustus'. 1929. Drypoint. 11 x 8 7/8. Edition 100, #39. Signed, titled, and numbered in pencil. A rich impression printed on the full sheet of pale blue/green-toned wove paper. Signed in pencil. A tongue-in-cheek image of the devil in the opera box...

Little is known about the artist, Edward (Ed) Sacks, although this print may have been made at the Art Students League in NYC. it is a cross between, as the title suggests, a Seated ...

William Rose was a hugely successful film and poster artist in the 1930s and 40s. This (Cubist Figure) seems to be an artist at work. Her hands are busy with a project on the surface...

Artist: Byron Browne (after), American (1907 - 1961) Title: Sousaphone Player in Marching Band Year: circa 1940 Medium: Collotype, signed in the plate Image Size: 26.5 x 20.5 in. (67...

Mary Lightfoot was born in Ravenna, Texas. She studied at the College of Industrial Arts in Denton and the North Texas State Teachers College prior to receiving a master of arts degree from Columbia University. Her entire teaching career was with the Dallas Public School system; she summered in Europe...

Signed titled, and dated, in pencil, and annotated in lower margin "My great-great grandfather's house, built in Bentleyville, Ohio in 1831; torn down in 1956." The wood engraving i...

German-born Robert Ernst Marx was a painter, printmaker, and teacher. His main subject was the human condition. This intaglio is somewhat unusual in ...

Samuel Chamberlain, N.A. The Hospital, Santa Cruz, Toledo. 1938. Etching. Kingslund/Chamberlain 271. 9 3/16 x 7 5/8 (sheet 13 1/8 x 10 1/8). Edition 100 for The Print Club of Albany...

This artwork :La Seine a Paris" c.1990 is an original color serigraph on hand made paper by American artist Linea Pergola, b.1953. It is hand signed and numbered A.P. 25/50 in pencil...

This is an enigmatic image. Between the two center/left trees there appears to be a figure, possibly a woman. At the right, seated on a rock, is a man, in robes. Religious images are...

Original Go Greyhound, Washington D. C. vintage travel poster. See your U. .S. A. Leave the driving to us. Conservation linen backed in very good / fine condition. Ready to frame. The image features a statue of a man on a horse in the foreground. In the back is the Capitol dome. A light blue background. The bottom right corner has the emblem of the Greyhound bus...

'Broken Carousel', color lithograph, 1950, edition 35, Fine and Looney 285. Signed, titled, and numbered '18/35' in pencil. Initialed in the stone, lower right. A fine, richly-inked ...

Martha Reed was the daughter of the artist Doel Reed and as an adult she joined her parents in Taos, New Mexico. There she designed clothes with a south-we...

Bibi Valentin. 1859. Etching and drypoint. Kennedy catalog 50 state ii; Glasgow catalog 34 state ii. 6 x 8 7/8 (sheet 8 11/16 x 10 11/16). Glasgow records 44 known impressions. A rich impression with burr, printed on watermarked laid paper with full margins. Signed and dated in the plate. Housed in a 20 x 16-inch archival mat A young girl, sits facing the viewer, leaning on her left elbow, legs extended to left. She wears a high-necked smock and buttoned boots...

Albert Abramovitz was an amazingly skilled wood engraver. This California Mission scene is unusual in his work, but carries the subject so well. It is signed and titled in pencil.

Past and Present Remo Farruggio, Italian/American (1904–1981) Date: Circa 1979 Lithograph, signed and numbered in pencil Edition of 300, AP 35 Image Size: 20.5 x 28 inches Size: 27 i...

The reference number on this work is Kraeft 103. It's from an edition of 100 and is signed, dated, and numbered, in pencil. Always an intaglio printmaker, Landeck switched from a more atmospheric drypoint technique to engraving while working at Stanley William Hayter's New York Atelier 17, in the 1940s. This print combines the forceful engraved diagonals with the softer drypoint lines. This is a view from the artist's window at the Delmonico Hotel, 3 East 14th Street...

Kent Hagerman was an amazing draftsman who managed to get fantastic detail into his work while showing the environment and atmosphere. This print captures the moment a 'pod' is bein...

Sidney Chafetz was known for his clever compositions and his many portraits, all made in the most 'difficult to control' medium of woodcut.. This charmi...

This artwork titled "My Wife Married a Lie" is a original color serigraph on Wove paper by American artist Kim Yoakum. It is hand signed and numbered 51/595 in pencil by the artist. ...

This artwork titled "Platform" 1963 is an original silkscreen by American artist Kenneth William Auvil, 1925-1999. It is signed, dated, titled and numbered 9/27 in pencil by the artist. The image size is 17 x 11.25 inches, framed size is 23.5 x 17.65 inches. Custom framed in a bronze color metal frame. It is in good condition, paper is slightly toned by age. About the artist: Educational Background University of Washington, 1953 MFA Art University of Washington, 1949 BA Art Teaching Experience San Jose State University, 1956 -1988 Selected Publications Serigraphy: Silk Screen Techniques for the Artist, Prentice‑Hall, 1965‑1996. Activities: Learning to Use the Macintosh Computer...

Original. ERP European Reunification Program, Inter-europaische Zusammenarbeit fur bessere Lebenbedingungen. Mounted on acid free archival linen. Lithography Kühn & Zoon, Rotterda...

This artwork titled "The King of the Masque" c.1980 is an original color lithograph on wove paper by American artist Robert Raymond Anderson, 1...

Signed and titled in pencil. Henry is known for her images of children and her Chicago environment. She frequently showed with the Chicago Society of Artists.

Winker is pulling out all the stops to make as stunning a Western Landscape as possible. The sky in this impression is open. There are also impressions with clouds in the sky. Sign...

Pamela Bianco achieve success as an artist in Britain while still a child. This accomplishment resulted in the family coming to the United States where ...

WILLY POGANY (1882 - 1955) TAMAS THE POWER OF BAD, c. 1940. Etching, signed and titled and numbered 50 in pencil. Image 12 x 9 inches. Sheet 14 7/8 x 10 3/4 inches. Generally goo...

Junk Shop (Philadelphia). 1932. Aquatint. 10 1/16 x 13 (sheet 12 1/2 x 15 1/2). Awarded the Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan 3rd prize, Art Institute of Chicago, March 24 - May 15, 1932. A subtle tonal impression printed on cream wove paper. Unsigned. Junk Shop (Philadelphia). 1932. Aquatint. 10 1/16 x 13 (sheet 12 1/2 x 15 1/2). Awarded the Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan 3rd prize, Art Institute of Chicago, March 24 - May 15, 1932. A subtle tonal impression printed on cream wove paper. Unsigned. Housed in a 16 x 20-inch archival mat, suitable for framing. Earl Horter...

Lollipop Lane. 2005. Etching. Chernow 157. Image size: 1 7/8 x 2 7/8. Sheet size: 9 x 9. Edition 5, #1. A fine impression printed in black/brown ink on white wove paper on the full sheet with deckle edges. Signed, titled and numbered in pencil. Housed in a 12 3/4 x 17 1/8-inch archival mat awaiting your choice of presentation. Chernow's work focuses on American film genres from the 1930s and 1940s. This technically difficult miniature etching...

Jean-Paul RIOPELLE Tribute to Nelligan : Visage of Nature Original lithograph Handsigned in pencil On Arches vellum 56 x 76 cm (c. 22 x 30 in) REFERENCE : Catalog raisonne Y. Riope...

This artwork titled "Summer Queen" c.1980 is an original color lithograph on wove paper by American artist Robert Raymond Anderson, 1945-2010. ...

This artwork titled "The Hearthkeepers" c.1980 is an original color lithograph on wove paper by American artist Robert Raymond Anderson, 1945-2...

This artwork titled "Baden Baden, Casino" 1988 is an original color serigraph by noted American artist LeRoy Neiman, 1921-2012. It is hand signed and numbered 261/375 in pencil by the artist. The image size is 36 x 42 inches, sheet size is 42 x 48 inches. With the blind stamp of the printer Styria Studio at the lower left corner margin. It is in excellent condition, three small pieces of hanging tape remain on the back. About the artist: Mr. Neiman's kinetic, quickly executed paintings and drawings, many of them published in Playboy, offered his fans gaudily colored visual reports on heavyweight boxing matches, Super Bowl games and Olympic contests, as well as social panoramas like the horse races at Deauville, France, and the Cannes Film Festival. Quite consciously, he cast himself in the mold of French Impressionists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Degas, chroniclers of public life who found rich social material at racetracks, dance halls and cafes. Mr. Neiman often painted or sketched on live television. With the camera recording his progress at the sketchpad or easel, he interpreted the drama of Olympic Games and Super Bowls for an audience of millions. When Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky faced off in Reykjavik, Iceland, to decide the world chess championship, Mr. Neiman was there, sketching. He was on hand to capture Federico Fellini directing "8 ½" and the Kirov Ballet performing in the Soviet Union. In popularity, Mr. Neiman rivaled American favorites like Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses and Andrew Wyeth. A prolific one-man industry, he generated hundreds of paintings, drawings, watercolors, limited-edition serigraph prints and coffee-table books yearly, earning gross annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars. Although he exhibited constantly and his work was included in the collections of dozens of museums around the world, critical respect eluded him. Mainstream art critics either ignored him completely or, if forced to consider his work, dismissed it with contempt as garish and superficial — magazine illustration with pretensions. Mr. Neiman professed not to care. Maybe the critics are right," he told American Artist magazine in 1995. "But what am I supposed to do about it — stop painting, change my work completely? I go back into the studio, and there I am at the easel again. I enjoy what I'm doing and feel good working. Other thoughts are just crowded out." His image suggested an artist well beyond the reach of criticism. A dandy and bon vivant, he cut an arresting figure with his luxuriant ear-to-ear mustache, white suits, flashy hats and Cuban cigars. "He quite intentionally invented himself as a flamboyant artist not unlike Salvador Dalí, in much the same way that I became Mr. Playboy in the late '50s," Hugh Hefner told Cigar Aficionado magazine in 1995. LeRoy Runquist was born on June 8, 1921, in St. Paul. His father, a railroad worker, deserted the family when LeRoy was quite young, and the boy took the surname of his stepfather. He showed a flair for art at an early age. While attending a local Roman Catholic school, he impressed schoolmates by drawing ink tattoos on their arms during recess. As a teenager, he earned money doing illustrations for local grocery stores. "I'd sketch a turkey, a cow, a fish, with the prices," he told Cigar Aficionado. "And then I had the good sense to draw the guy who owned the store. This gave me tremendous power as a kid." After being drafted into the Army in 1942, he served as a cook in the European theater but in his spare time painted risqué murals on the walls of kitchens and mess halls. The Army's Special Services Division, recognizing his talent, put him to work painting stage sets for Red Cross shows when he was stationed in Germany after the war. On leaving the military, he studied briefly at the St. Paul School of Art (now the Minnesota Museum of American Art) before enrolling in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where, after four years of study, he taught figure drawing and fashion illustration throughout the 1950s. When the janitor of the apartment building next door to his threw out half-empty cans of enamel house paint, Mr. Neiman found his métier. Experimenting with the new medium, he embraced a rapid style of applying paint to canvas imposed by the free-flowing quality of the house paint. While doing freelance fashion illustration for the Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago in the early 1950s, he became friendly with Mr. Hefner, a copywriter there who was on the verge of publishing the first issue of a men's magazine. In 1954, after five issues of Playboy had appeared, Mr. Neiman ran into Mr. Hefner and invited him to his apartment to see his paintings of boxers, strip clubs and restaurants. Mr. Hefner, impressed, showed the work to Playboy's art director, Art Paul, who commissioned an illustration for "Black Country," a story by Charles Beaumont about a jazz musician. Thus began a relationship that endured for more than half a century and established Mr. Neiman's reputation. In 1955, when Mr. Hefner decided that the party-jokes page needed visual interest, Mr. Neiman came up with the Femlin, a curvaceous brunette who cavorted across the page in thigh-high stockings, high-heeled shoes, opera gloves and nothing else. She appeared in every issue of the magazine thereafter. Three years later, Mr. Neiman devised a running feature, "Man at His Leisure." For the next 15 years, he went on assignment to glamour spots around the world, sending back visual reports on subjects as varied as the races at Royal Ascot, the dining room of the Tour d'Argent in Paris, the nude beaches of the Dalmatian coast, the running of the bulls at Pamplona and Carnaby Street in swinging London. He later produced more than 100 paintings and 2 murals for 18 of the Playboy clubs that opened around the world. "Playboy made the good life a reality for me and made it the subject matter of my paintings — not affluence and luxury as such, but joie de vivre itself," Mr. Neiman told V.I.P. magazine in 1962. Working in the same copywriting department at Carson Pirie Scott as Mr. Hefner was Janet Byrne, a student at the Art Institute. She and Mr. Neiman married in 1957. She survives him. A prolific artist, he generated dozens of paintings each year that routinely commanded five-figure prices. When Christie's auctioned off the Playboy archives in 2003, his 1969 painting Man at His Leisure: Le Mans sold for $107,550. Sales of the signed, limited-edition print versions of his paintings, published in editions of 250 to 500, became a lucrative business in itself after Knoedler Publishing, a wholesale operation, was created in 1975 to publish and distribute his serigraphs, etchings, books and posters. Mr. Neiman's most famous images came from the world of sports. His long association with the Olympics began with the Winter Games in Squaw Valley in 1960, and he went on to cover the games, on live television, in Munich in 1972, Montreal in 1976, Lake Placid in 1980, and Sarajevo and Los Angeles in 1984, using watercolor, ink or felt-tip marker to produce images with the dispatch of a courtroom sketch artist. At the 1978 and 1979 Super Bowls, he used a computerized electronic pen to portray the action for CBS. Although he was best known for scenes filled with people and incident, he also painted many portraits. Athletes predominated, with Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath among his more famous subjects, but he also painted Leonard Bernstein, the ballet dancer Suzanne Farrell...

SCARCE EARLY WORK. BEN SHAHN Levana and our Lady's Sorrows. lithograph printed in sepia on Papier Ancien, 1931. 13 1/8x9 7/8 inches (sheets), full margins, loose as issued. One of o...

Bold woodblock print by Byron Randall (American, 1918-1999). Titled "Schooner + Doryman", numbered "1st ed.", and signed and dated "Byron Randall '62" along the bottom edge. Small am...

Original vintage travel poster: HOLLAND AMERICA CRUISES. Artist: David Klein. This poster is printed on a thicker paperstock and doesn't require ...

Yacht Races, Grand Lake, Colorado, vintage 1933 original signed lithograph by Arnold Ronnebeck (1885-1947). Numbered 23 in an edition of 25 prints. Black and white coastal, marine subject. Presented in an archival mat, outer dimensions measure 20 x 16 ⅛ inches. Image size measures 13 ¾ x 9 ⅛ inches (sight). Custom framing services are available. Print is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Estate of Arnold Ronnebeck About the Artist: Modernist sculptor, lithographer and museum administrator, Rönnebeck was a noted member of European and American avant-garde circles in the early twentieth century before settling in Denver, Colorado, in 1926. After studying architecture at the Royal Art School in Berlin for two years beginning in 1905, he moved to Paris in 1908 to study sculpture with Aristide Maillol and Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. While there he met and befriended American modernist painter, Marsden Hartley, of whom he sculpted a bronze head that was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1912 and the following year at Hartley’s solo show of paintings at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in New York. A frequent guest of Gertrude Stein’s Saturday "evenings" in Paris, she described Rönnebeck as "charming and always invited to dinner," along with Pablo Picasso, Mabel Dodge (Luhan) and Charles Demuth. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rönnebeck returned to Germany where he served as an officer in the German Imperial Army on the front lines. Twice wounded, including in the Battle of Marne in France, Kaiser Wilhelm II awarded him the Iron Cross. During the war Hartley fell in love with Rönnebeck’s cousin, Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, who was killed in combat. As a tribute to Freyburg, Hartley created Portrait of a German Officer (1914) now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. After the war Rönnebeck traveled in Italy with German writer, Max Sidow, and German poet, Theodor Daubler, doing a series of drawings of Positano and the Amalfi Coast that formed the basis for his lithographs on the subject. The death of his finacée, the young American opera singer Alice Miriam in 1922 and his own family’s increasing financial problems in post-World War I Germany led him to immigrate to the United States in 1923. After living briefly with Miriam’s family in Washington, DC, he moved to New York where he became part of the avant-garde circle around Alfred Stieglitz. His essay, "Through the Eyes of a European Sculptor," appeared in the catalog for the Anderson Gallery exhibition, "Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs & Things, Recent & Never Publicly Shown, by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz." In New York Rönnebeck began producing Precisionist-style lithographs of the city’s urban landscapes which he termed "living cubism." Some of them were reproduced in Vanity Fair magazine. Through Stieglitz he met Erhard Weyhe head of the Weyhe Gallery who, with its director Carl Zigrosser, arranged Rönnebeck’s first solo American exhibition in May 1925 at the gallery in New York. Comprising some sixty works – prints, drawings and sculpture – the show subsequently traveled on a thirteen-month tour of major American cities. Until the end of his life, the gallery represented him, along with other American artists Adolf Dehn, Wanda Gag, Rockwell Kent, J.J. Lankes, Louis Lozowick, Reginald Marsh and John Sloan. In the summer of 1925, as the guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Rönnebeck first saw Taos, New Mexico, which Marsden Hartley had encouraged him to visit. It was there that he met his future wife, Louise Emerson, an easel painter and muralist. A year later they were married in New York before relocating to Denver. He served as director of the Denver Art Museum from 1926 to 1930 where he invited Marsden Hartley to lecture on Cézanne’s art in 1928. Rönnebeck fostered the development of the museum’s collection of American Indian art and the curation of modernist art exhibitions. In addition to his work at the museum, he was professor of sculpture at the University of Denver’s College of Fine and Applied Arts from 1929 to 1935, and wrote a weekly art column in the Rocky Mountain News. His best known Denver sculptures from the late 1920s in bronze, copper, stone, wood and terra cotta include a reredos, The Epiphany, at St. Martin’s Chapel; The History of Money (six panels) at the Denver National Bank; The Ascension at the Church of Ascension; and the William V. Hodges Family Memorial at Fairmount Cemetery. At the same time he did a series of terra cotta relief panels for La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the 1930s his bas-relief aluminum friezes of stylized Pueblo and Hopi Indian Kachina masks...

David HOCKNEY Portrait of Reading Man Original Vintage Poster (offset-lithograph) Printed in France by Imprimerie Dermont in Paris 64 x 45 cm (c. 25.1 x 17.7 inch) This poster was created for the exhibition "David Hockney Dessins et Gravures" April 15th - May 24th at Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris. The poster represents Parisian dandy and Karl Lagerfeld's companion, Jacques de Bascher...

Artist unknown "Gold and Blue Gun" c. 1970s Silkscreen on paper Image size 21.25"x17" paper size 26"x40" unframed $350 Unsigned *Listed price reflects custom framing selected by sell...

Shepard FAIREY (Obey Giant) Flowering Eiffel Tower (A Delicate Balance) Original sceen print Handsigned in pencil Authenticated with blind stamp on the artist A rare AP (Artist proo...

Clayton Knight drew a careful rendering of the plane -- even showing how it would look in the air as it banked. Edward Stinson was an accomplished, eve...

The reference number on this work is Kraeft 88. It's from an edition of 100 and is signed, dated, and numbered, in pencil. Always an intaglio printmaker, Landeck switched from a mor...

This artwork titled "Left Bank Cafe, Paris" 1987 is an original color serigraph by noted American artist LeRoy Neiman, 1921-2012. It is hand signed and numbered H.C 166/175 in pencil by the artist. The image size is 26 x 38 inches, sheet size is 32.25 x 44 inches. With the blind stamp of the printer Styria Studio at the lower left corner margin. It is in excellent condition, two small pieces of hanging tape remain on the back. About the artist: Mr. Neiman's kinetic, quickly executed paintings and drawings, many of them published in Playboy, offered his fans gaudily colored visual reports on heavyweight boxing matches, Super Bowl games and Olympic contests, as well as social panoramas like the horse races at Deauville, France, and the Cannes Film Festival. Quite consciously, he cast himself in the mold of French Impressionists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Degas, chroniclers of public life who found rich social material at racetracks, dance halls and cafes. Mr. Neiman often painted or sketched on live television. With the camera recording his progress at the sketchpad or easel, he interpreted the drama of Olympic Games and Super Bowls for an audience of millions. When Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky faced off in Reykjavik, Iceland, to decide the world chess championship, Mr. Neiman was there, sketching. He was on hand to capture Federico Fellini directing "8 ½" and the Kirov Ballet performing in the Soviet Union. In popularity, Mr. Neiman rivaled American favorites like Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses and Andrew Wyeth. A prolific one-man industry, he generated hundreds of paintings, drawings, watercolors, limited-edition serigraph prints and coffee-table books yearly, earning gross annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars. Although he exhibited constantly and his work was included in the collections of dozens of museums around the world, critical respect eluded him. Mainstream art critics either ignored him completely or, if forced to consider his work, dismissed it with contempt as garish and superficial — magazine illustration with pretensions. Mr. Neiman professed not to care. Maybe the critics are right," he told American Artist magazine in 1995. "But what am I supposed to do about it — stop painting, change my work completely? I go back into the studio, and there I am at the easel again. I enjoy what I'm doing and feel good working. Other thoughts are just crowded out." His image suggested an artist well beyond the reach of criticism. A dandy and bon vivant, he cut an arresting figure with his luxuriant ear-to-ear mustache, white suits, flashy hats and Cuban cigars. "He quite intentionally invented himself as a flamboyant artist not unlike Salvador Dalí, in much the same way that I became Mr. Playboy in the late '50s," Hugh Hefner told Cigar Aficionado magazine in 1995. LeRoy Runquist was born on June 8, 1921, in St. Paul. His father, a railroad worker, deserted the family when LeRoy was quite young, and the boy took the surname of his stepfather. He showed a flair for art at an early age. While attending a local Roman Catholic school, he impressed schoolmates by drawing ink tattoos on their arms during recess. As a teenager, he earned money doing illustrations for local grocery stores. "I'd sketch a turkey, a cow, a fish, with the prices," he told Cigar Aficionado. "And then I had the good sense to draw the guy who owned the store. This gave me tremendous power as a kid." After being drafted into the Army in 1942, he served as a cook in the European theater but in his spare time painted risqué murals on the walls of kitchens and mess halls. The Army's Special Services Division, recognizing his talent, put him to work painting stage sets for Red Cross shows when he was stationed in Germany after the war. On leaving the military, he studied briefly at the St. Paul School of Art (now the Minnesota Museum of American Art) before enrolling in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where, after four years of study, he taught figure drawing and fashion illustration throughout the 1950s. When the janitor of the apartment building next door to his threw out half-empty cans of enamel house paint, Mr. Neiman found his métier. Experimenting with the new medium, he embraced a rapid style of applying paint to canvas imposed by the free-flowing quality of the house paint. While doing freelance fashion illustration for the Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago in the early 1950s, he became friendly with Mr. Hefner, a copywriter there who was on the verge of publishing the first issue of a men's magazine. In 1954, after five issues of Playboy had appeared, Mr. Neiman ran into Mr. Hefner and invited him to his apartment to see his paintings of boxers, strip clubs and restaurants. Mr. Hefner, impressed, showed the work to Playboy's art director, Art Paul, who commissioned an illustration for "Black Country," a story by Charles Beaumont about a jazz musician. Thus began a relationship that endured for more than half a century and established Mr. Neiman's reputation. In 1955, when Mr. Hefner decided that the party-jokes page needed visual interest, Mr. Neiman came up with the Femlin, a curvaceous brunette who cavorted across the page in thigh-high stockings, high-heeled shoes, opera gloves and nothing else. She appeared in every issue of the magazine thereafter. Three years later, Mr. Neiman devised a running feature, "Man at His Leisure." For the next 15 years, he went on assignment to glamour spots around the world, sending back visual reports on subjects as varied as the races at Royal Ascot, the dining room of the Tour d'Argent in Paris, the nude beaches of the Dalmatian coast, the running of the bulls at Pamplona and Carnaby Street in swinging London. He later produced more than 100 paintings and 2 murals for 18 of the Playboy clubs that opened around the world. "Playboy made the good life a reality for me and made it the subject matter of my paintings — not affluence and luxury as such, but joie de vivre itself," Mr. Neiman told V.I.P. magazine in 1962. Working in the same copywriting department at Carson Pirie Scott as Mr. Hefner was Janet Byrne, a student at the Art Institute. She and Mr. Neiman married in 1957. She survives him. A prolific artist, he generated dozens of paintings each year that routinely commanded five-figure prices. When Christie's auctioned off the Playboy archives in 2003, his 1969 painting Man at His Leisure: Le Mans sold for $107,550. Sales of the signed, limited-edition print versions of his paintings, published in editions of 250 to 500, became a lucrative business in itself after Knoedler Publishing, a wholesale operation, was created in 1975 to publish and distribute his serigraphs, etchings, books and posters. Mr. Neiman's most famous images came from the world of sports. His long association with the Olympics began with the Winter Games in Squaw Valley in 1960, and he went on to cover the games, on live television, in Munich in 1972, Montreal in 1976, Lake Placid in 1980, and Sarajevo and Los Angeles in 1984, using watercolor, ink or felt-tip marker to produce images with the dispatch of a courtroom sketch artist. At the 1978 and 1979 Super Bowls, he used a computerized electronic pen to portray the action for CBS. Although he was best known for scenes filled with people and incident, he also painted many portraits. Athletes predominated, with Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath among his more famous subjects, but he also painted Leonard Bernstein, the ballet dancer Suzanne Farrell...