MBFA

This work comes from the collection of Arnold Newman.

Arnold Newman was born in New York and studied art at Miami University. He became a photographer because he couldn't afford to finish his university course. He left and was offered a job through a family friend as an apprentice to a professional photographer.

His first pictures of people were taken on the street, but he was particularly influenced by the photography of the FSA photographers including Walker Evans. They posed their subjects in their living rooms or in front of their bomes for their documentary portraits. It was an approach Newman used and developed as 'environmental portraiture.'

Over the next 50 years, Newman went on to photograph most major celebrities of the 20th century for magazines such as Life, Look, Fortune, Holiday, The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, including Igor Stravinsky with the lid of his grand piano making a note, Leonard Bernstein, George Harrison, Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Francis Bacon, Edward Hopper, Salvador Dali, Georgia O'Keefe, Berenice Abbott, Alfred Stieglitz, Franz Kline, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Max Ernst,Isaac Asimov, Eugene O’Neill, Paul Auster, Harry S. Truman, Yitzhak Rabin, Dwight Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe