”[Newman] quintessentializes the aura of achievement, and does so in style, at once immaculate and highly evocative, that has learned all the right lessons from the classics of modern painting which have clearly shaped his keen visual intelligence.” – Hilton Kramer, in his review of One Mind’s Eye in the New York Times Book Review.
Arnold Newman’s star was already established in the photographic firmament when Godine published his first book, One Mind’s Eye, in 1975. It confirmed his ability to portray the wealthy, powerful, and famous with sympathy, insight, and dignity. What was also clear in this landmark monograph, and his subsequent books, Artists, published thirty years ago, and Arnold Newman’s Americans, issued in 1992, was his particular affection and affinity for artists, for fellow creators, for people who made their living, as he did, by creating.
Somehow it seems fitting that thirty-five years later Godine would be publishing what will probably be the final tribute to a great American original. In association with the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, we have assembled fifty-six of Newman’s photographs of artists, all of whom, in one way or another, have been connected with the great state of Maine. From Berenice Abbott to Andrew Wyeth, the list reads like a Who’s Who of American art in the last quarter of the last century. Included are the “old guard” that Newman managed to capture before their passing Hopper, Martin, O’Keeffe, Sheeler, Sloan, and Steichen, to name but a few, as well as the new generation of abstract expressionists and modernists rising to fill their shoes Red Grooms, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, Jerry Uelsmann and Paul Caponigro.
Unlike previous books, each portrait will be accompanied by an essay by Michael Komanecky, the Farnsworth’s Chief Curator, who has written acute appreciations of the artists and their work and explained their association with the Pine Tree State. What emerges from the portraits, as well as in the text, is the inescapable fact that Newman was first, foremost, and always, an artist, using the tool of his camera much as a painter would a brush.