Arnold Newman's Portland exhibit shows why he is a trail blazer in portrait photography

IN A LITTLE-KNOWN museum hidden away on the seventh floor of an office building in northwest Portland, one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century quietly mounted a summer show of 45 classic black-and-white portraits.

Arnold Newman, who is still taking pictures at the age of 81, is sometimes known as the father of environmental portraiture. Years ago, it was Newman's genius to take the portrait session out of the studio, where it had been trapped for decades among stilted props and musty backdrops, and into his subjects' home settings - showing a pianist at the keyboard, for example, or a writer at his desk. That was almost instantly seen for the good idea it was, and before long Newman was working regularly for magazines such as Life, Look, Esquire and Harper's Bazaar. Among his subjects were the biggest names of his day. Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Marilyn Monroe, most of the leadership of Israel and several American presidents all have sat for his camera.

Newman is beyond any doubt a photo superstar. His name is mentioned in most histories of photography; his work can be found in museums and private collections around the world, including the National Portrait Gallery. He just finished a show at the International Center for Photography in New York and another at the Howard Greenberg Gallery there. He's working on a book. And next year, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., will send a retrospective of his work around the United States and abroad.

So how's it happen that a guy like this is exhibiting photos in the tiny Oregon Jewish Museum at Montgomery Park, a Portland office complex?

Simple: His son David lives in Portland and is on the museum board. At the son's request, Arnold Newman himself curated "One World, One People" for the museum, choosing portraits he has made of Jewish people over the course of his career.

"I wanted to make a different kind of a show for a change," Newman explained in a recent phone interview from his apartment on 67th Street in Manhattan. Newman certainly shows no signs of slowing down. His work in the Portland show includes a smiling portrait he made just last year of then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, where Newman long has enjoyed amazing access to the highest government figures.

And that occasions a story, which he begins like this, speaking over the phone in a slightly gruff but still courtly New York accent: "You know, this has been the busiest period of my life. We were just simply working overtime. At my age, most guys are either smelling the flowers, retired, or no longer with us."

"What happened was, in my late 20s I -- well, it's a long story. I was dating one girl. It wasn't a serious date or anything like that, but I had been taking John Garfield's secretary out. He was quite a famous movie actor in his day. We bought some cheesecake from Lindy's and took it up to her friend's apartment near the theater district. A third girl had moved in with them. And she was beautiful!"

The friend was serving food in the kitchen that night. "I kept going back in the kitchen for drinks of water and got her name and telephone number and about a month later asked her for a date."

That first date went well, but the young woman mentioned, a bit mysteriously, that she had to return to work that night at 11. Given her piercing beauty and the location of the hotel lobby where she had asked her to meet him, Newman was afraid he'd met up with a high-priced call girl. But he saw her again, and one night she offered to take him to where she worked - in a penthouse above the Copacabana nightclub. "I almost turned back," he says.

But Newman followed her up to the apartment, where the door was answered by a husky man in shirtsleeves. "Come on in," the man said. "You're Augusta's friend. We can trust you."

The man at the door turned out to be Teddy Kollek, later the mayor of Jerusalem but then David Ben-Gurion's right-hand man in an undercover operation that was smuggling arms to the fledgling state of Israel. The penthouse was the secret headquarters of Haganah - later the Israeli Defense Force. And Augusta wasn't a prostitute at all -- just a secret agent. Newman not only married the beauty - he and Gus, as she's known, just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary - but has remained on close terms for half a century with the inner circles of Israeli political power.

The Portland show reflects this. Over the years, Newman has photographed Golda Meir, Shimon Peres, Yitzchak Rabin and Moshe Dayan, as well as many lesser-known but important Israeli figures. In one of the most striking photos in the show, Isser Harel, former chief of Mossad, the Israeli secret service, is shown holding a photograph of Nazi death camp architect Adolph Eichmann, whose capture in Buenos Aires he orchestrated in 1960. In Newman's stark photo, Harel looks every bit the hard, dark man it would take to run a war criminal to ground. His eyes are flat and uncompromising, and his face betrays only the smallest hint of satisfaction over having bested his monstrous enemy.

Newman started out in life to be a painter. Having grown up in New York and Miami, he went to art school for two years at the University of Miami before running out of money at the height of the Depression. Through friends, he found himself a job at a cheap portrait studio in Philadelphia, where he figured he would work for long enough to get money to go back to art school. Meanwhile, he set about learning the business of photographic portraiture, which was then, as now, sometimes drearily mechanical. "Everything was by the numbers," he says. "Your lights, your camera. Everything was nailed down. It was much easier to print these pictures inexpensively. Even the expensive studios were doing the same thing. They were just charging more."

Newman was bothered by the assembly line photography, which reduced everyone to a single image. "They might have a photograph of a dignified looking man all dressed up in his Sunday best, and the identical photograph of a different man roughly the same age. One was the owner of a local factory and the other was a foreman on the assembly line - and you couldn't tell the difference. That sort of worked against my way of thinking. I wanted to say more about the person."

Newman started photographing people differently - not at the studio, which wouldn't allow any variation in technique, but for himself, taking pictures of friends, artists mostly, who understood he was trying something different. In June 1941, he visited New York and wrangled introductions to show his photos to two prominent men: photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, who had helped define photography as a respectable artistic medium, and Beaumont Newhall, curator of photography for the Museum of Modern Art, the first museum in the world to create such a position. The two men liked his work, and within months Newman was offered his own gallery show with artist Ben Rose. The show was a success, and soon Newman began getting assignments from top magazines.

The portraits he selected to show in Portland span six decades, from the early 1940s to the present day. What's most striking about Newman's early work is how completely he used his settings to compose the overall portraits, sometimes to the point that his subjects begin to get lost in the picture. Thus the face of painter Marc Chagall in Newman's 1942 portrait actually blends into the background formed by Chagall's work. And sculptor Chaim Gross, in a portrait made that same year, peers over a carved figure of two women as though he were part of the sculpture. Similarly, in a 1968 photo, composer Leonard Bernstein is dwarfed by the large, white musical score spread out before him and by the empty performance hall behind. The individual person, Newman seems to be saying, is far less important than the work.

He takes that approach even further with Otto Frank, father of famed diarist Anne Frank. In a 1960 photograph, Newman shows the aging man almost obscured by the shadows inside the Frank house in Amsterdam, the father's life overcome by the tragedy of the daughter's death. Newman's later work in the show is more direct, less turned in on itself. His 1998 portrait of Netanyahu, for example, shows a smiling face in close-up, an Israeli flag just visible behind.

Has the person become more important than the position?

Perhaps yes, Newman said, though the session with Netanyahu was unexpectedly cut short after only 15 minutes, meaning Newman had to abandon some of his planned poses.

"But you do change, also," he said. "I find I am getting a little freer in some of the things I do. I am not using as many large cameras as I used to. I am shooting a lot in 35 millimeter. You can do things with 35 millimeter you simply can't do with a 4-by-5 view camera or a Hasselblad or an 8-by-10."

Despite his youthful ambitions, Newman never went back to painting, but he retained an artist's mentality about his photography - and maintained connections in the art world.

And so, besides Chagall, he would photograph dadaist Man Ray, abstract painter Piet Mondrian (who traded him an early sketch of "Broadway Boogie Woogie" for a photo) and sculptor George Segal. And there were artists of other kinds, too: writers Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg and Isaac Asimov are in the Portland show, along with scientists Robert Oppenheimer and Arno Penzias. "You don't take photographs with your camera," Newman said. "You take them with your heart. Your mind. And you gotta keep doing it and keep doing it and follow your own inclination. Don't do what is fashionable. All that means is you're following somebody else."

July 18, 1999