Arnold Newman was born in New York City on March 3, 1918. His parents, Freda and Isidor Newman, children of middle-class Jewish immigrants from Poland and Germany, produced three sons: Godfrey, a lawyer; Arnold, the photographer; and Edward, who owned a funeral home. Isidor Newman had been in the clothing manufacturing business in New York City, but when this business failed in the early 1920s, the family moved to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where they opened a dry-goods store. The business was successful and after it was sold during the depression, the banks failed and the family lost everything. They then went into the hotel leasing business and lived in Atlantic City during the short summer and in Miami Beach during the winter.
From a very young age, Arnold was fascinated by art and was constantly encouraged by his parents. He attended Ida M. Fisher High School in Miami Beach and, upon graduation in 1936, he was offered a work-study scholarship at the University of Miami. From 1936 until 1938, he took art classes and, at the same time, he worked at the University as a teaching assistant (hiring models and monitoring the classes). During the day, he worked 8-hour split-shifts, morning and night, in a bookstore. He studied under the “realist” artists Denman Fink, who was head of the Department of Arts and had designed the city of Coral Gables, and Richard Merrick, who taught etching and art history, the latter one of great importance for Arnold Newman. After two years, he was forced to leave school because of economic difficulties.
It was during his summers in Atlantic City that Arnold Newman was exposed to the advanced ideas about modern art through a group of students at the School of Industrial Arts (now Philadelphia College of Arts), especially his friend Ben Rose.
In 1938 after leaving school, he accepted a job as an apprentice in a small chain of photo studios belonging to Leon Perskie, a family friend and professional photographer in Philadelphia, and also worked in his studios in Baltimore and Allentown, Pennsylvania. During the day, he sometimes had to photograph seventy sitters, but at night and during his lunch hour and on Sundays, he experimented in the back streets of the city. He soon discovered that he loved photography, and temporarily put painting aside, until a few years later, when he realized he couldn't catch up with painting and concentrated on photography.
In December 1939, feeling alone and underpaid, he found a job as manager of Tooley-Myron Studios, a chain studio in West Palm Beach, Florida. His new salary of $30 per week permitted him to buy a 4x5 Speed Graphic camera. He was able to take better pictures and was influenced extensively by Walker Evans, an important photographer working for the Farm Security Administration, as well as by modern painters such as Picasso, Mondrian, Braque, etc.
In West Palm Beach, while shooting and printing his own pictures in his spare time, the run-down qualities of the old buildings and the appalling conditions of the black areas became catalysts for Newman's journey to abstraction as well his fascination with people in their own environments. He was feeling isolated in West Palm Beach, where he divided his time between making portraits for $2.98 and yearning to express his inner creative self. This motivated him to go to New York in the spring of 1941 to seek advice on whether he was wasting his time in photography. Instead, at 23 years of age, he was discovered, and this was the turning point of his life.
Beaumont Newhall, Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, discerning the genius behind these early pictures of Arnold Newman, offered him his insight and support and urged him to show them to Alfred Stieglitz, the famous photographer and gallery dealer. Newhall personally called Stieglitz and made an appointment for Newman to walk over and see him that same day. Stieglitz gave him the same enthusiastic reception and told him to add his name to a list of photographers to represent America at an exhibit in London. The next day, Newman went to see Dr. Leslie, of the famous A-D Gallery, and was offered a joint show together with his friend Ben Rose, called “Two Unknown Photographers” in the fall of 1941. Unhappily, Arnold Newman's father, Isidor, died four days before the opening and the exhibit was postponed for one week.
The A-D exhibition made a big impact and was visited by many art directors, critics and photographers. Beaumont Newhall together with Ansel Adams bought the first of many Arnold Newman prints for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. After the exhibition Newman decided to remain in New York, which had become the center of artistic creation internationally. He dedicated himself to experimenting with his ideas about portraiture and chose his heroes, the artists, to work with. He began photographing such personalities as George Grosz, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall and other artists, including the realists Moses and Raphael Soyer and Chaim Gross. Many of these artists became his friends. These “experiments” were Newman's intention to take the portrait out of the studio into the “real world.” This resulted in Newman's being known today as the “father of the environmental portrait.”
When World War II broke out on December 7, 1941, he returned to Miami to enter military service, but was rejected. He started taking pictures at the Versailles Hotel in Miami Beach and soon opened his own studio, which by the end of the War was employing more than nine photographers and assistants.
During visits to New York, he continued photographing artists and other people. In 1945 he was given his first major one-man show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, called “Artists Look Like This.” The show was nationally acclaimed and was given large coverage in magazines such Life, Harper's Bazaar, Art News and New York Times. The Museum bought the complete exhibit for less than what one print would cost today. Newman decided to leave his studio in Miami Beach and become a freelance photographer in New York in 1946. Soon he received his first assignments for Life and Harper's Bazaar magazines. In 1948 he moved into a studio apartment on West 67th Street. The block was built for artists a century earlier with large duplex studios with northern lighting soaring two floors in the main rooms. His studio was in one building and he lived in another two doors away.
In 1949, in their first studio on 67th Street, he married Augusta Rubinstein, a woman of exceptional beauty and personality. Augusta came from Chester, Pennsylvania, and her very first job was working for Rabbi Steven S. Wise in his rabbinical school. Wanting to do something more for the struggle for the statehood of Israel, she was sent by an organization to the secret headquarters of Haganah, the underground Zionist military organization in British- occupied Palestine fighting for the creation of the State of Israel. Augusta began working with Teddy Kollek, smuggling arms, ammunitions, tanks etc. to Israel. These activities were illegal and Augusta could have gone to jail as there was a worldwide embargo on arms that remained in effect until Israel became a State. While working in the central secret headquarters, she and Arnold met through mutual friends and began to date. When it became known that they were to be married, editors who knew Arnold Newman at Harper's Bazaar and Life magazines, asked if she would be interested in modeling. Augusta turned to Arnold and said: “Do you want that nonsense or do you want a family?” And so they had a family.
Augusta Newman was the cornerstone of Arnold Newman's world, as his life partner, as the mother of his two sons, Eric and David, and as his studio manager and business associate. They had four grandchildren. Their residence, two doors away from their studio, housed an exquisite art collection, received in exchange for Newman's portraits of the artists.
Arnold Newman died in June, 2006. Over the years, celebrities, politicians, artists, actors, judges - literally every personality of importance in America and the world - has come before his lens. His portraits have become the definitive image of that person in the public's eyes. His spirit has reached a wide audience through magazines, advertising, fourteen books, experimental photographs, numerous worldwide exhibitions and his teaching and lecturing.
