| Names: | | | Dates: | 1918, 3 March - 2006, 6 June | | Born: | US, NY, New York | | Died: | US, NY, New York | | Active: | US |
Portrait photographer who specialized in using a minimal number of items in the shot but the selected objects really inform us about the subject. His photographs of Igor Stravinsky sitting at a grand piano and Alfred Krupp in his factory are particularly famous.Preparing biographies
Biography provided by Focal Press
Born in New York, Newman might have become a painter but for the fact that his family’s finances from several oceanside hotels evaporated in 1938 while he was studying art at the University of Miami. As compensation for disrupted academic study, Newman accepted work with a family friend who ran a chain of cheap, mass production portrait studios (Perskie’s in Philadelphia area department stores). For about a year, Newman makes 49 cent portraits, toils in the darkroom but becomes encouraged by his vision for meaningful photographs. By 1940 Newman adopts the camera as his artist’s tool and makes portraits (especially artists), abstractions, and social documentation. In 1946 he is in New York and begins freelance assignments for Harper’s Bazaar and LIFE. His most famous image is a 1946 portrait of Igor Stravinsky in the extreme lower left corner of a graphic space dominated by the silhouette lid of his piano — ironically, rejected for publication by Brodovitch for Harper’s Bazaar. During the next half century, Newman’s portraits established the high water mark for "environmental portraiture." The highest echelon of these groups — artists, presidents, corporate leaders, musicians, authors — have been the subjects of Newman compositions (most in black and white) that place the personality in a dynamic equilibrium with that person’s tools, creations, symbols, or work space. Max Ernst sits in a high-back, ornate throne next to a kachina, his head wrapped in surreal curls of smoke; Mondrian is amid a geometric grid of his canvases and an easel. Shooting 24 covers for LIFE, Newman’s work has also appeared in Fortune, Look, Holiday, Esquire, Town and Country, and The New Yorker. A recent monograph, Arnold Newman (Taschen, 2000), is a comprehensive survey of Newman’s photographic oeuvre with biographical essays, a chronology, and extensive bibliography.
(Author: Ken White - Rochester Institute of Technology)
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409]
(Used with permission)
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Family history
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Arnold Newman
In September 2006 the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Austin purchased the archive of Arnold Newman. The archive consists of all his slides, negatives, contact sheets and over 2,000 prints.
| Wikipedia has a biography of this photographer. | | Go to website | | Getty Research, Los Angeles, USA has an ULAN (Union List of Artists Names Online) entry for this photographer. This is useful for checking names and they frequently provide a brief biography. | | Go to website | Grove Art Online (www.groveart.com) has a biography of this artist.
[NOTE: This is a subscription service and you will need to pay an annual fee to access the content.] | | Go to website |
The following books are useful starting points to obtain brief biographies but they are not substitutes for the monographs on individual photographers. |
• Beaton, Cecil & Buckland, Gail 1975 The Magic Eye: The Genius of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown & Company) p.226 [Useful short biographies with personal asides and one or more example images.]
• Capa, Cornell (ed.) 1984 The International Center of Photography: Encyclopedia of Photography (New York, Crown Publishers, Inc. - A Pound Press Book) p.358-359
• Evans, Martin Marix (Executive ed.) 1995 Contemporary Photographers [Third Edition] (St. James Press - An International Thomson Publishing Company) [Expensive reference work but highly informative.]
• Lenman, Robin (ed.) 2005 The Oxford Companion to the Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press) [Includes a short biography on Arnold Newman.]
• Witkin, Lee D. and Barbara London 1979 The Photograph Collector’s Guide (London: Secker and Warburg) p.202 [Long out of print but an essential reference work - the good news is that a new edition is in preparation.]
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Library of Congress, Washington, USA
Approximate number of records: 12 records
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