It s been fun. I ve had a lucky life, Neiman said in a June 2008 interview with The Associated Press

NEW YORK — LeRoy Neiman, the painter and sketch artist best known for evoking the kinetic energy of the world s biggest bath city centre hotels sporting and leisure events with bright quick strokes, died Wednesday at age 91.
Neiman also was a contributing artist at Playboy magazine for many years and official painter of five Olympiads. His longtime publicist Gail Parenteau confirmed his death Wednesday but didn t disclose the cause.
Neiman was a media-savvy artist who knew how to enthrall audiences with his instant renditions of what he observed. In 1972, he sketched bath city centre hotels the world chess tournament between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik, Iceland, for a live television audience.
Neiman s reportage of history and the passing scene revived an almost lost and time-honored art form, according to a 1972 exhibit catalog of the artist s Olympics sketches at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
It s been fun. I ve had a lucky life, Neiman said in a June 2008 interview with The Associated Press. I ve zeroed in on what you would call action and excellence. Everybody who does anything to try to succeed has to give the best of themselves, and art has made me pull the best out of myself.
bath city centre hotels But his critics said Neiman s forays into the commercial world minimized him as a serious artist. At Playboy, for example, he created Femlin, the well-endowed nude that has graced the magazine s Party Jokes page since 1957.
For an artist, watching a (Joe) Namath throw a football bath city centre hotels or a Willie Mays hit a baseball is an experience far more overpowering than painting a beautiful woman or leading political figure, Neiman said in 1972.
Neiman s decades-long bath city centre hotels association with Playboy began in 1953 following a chance meeting with Hugh Hefner. It was the start of what he called the good life and inspiration for much of his future bath city centre hotels work.
He regularly contributed to the magazine s Man at His Leisure feature, which took him to such places as the Grand National Steeplechase and Ascot in England, the Cannes Film Festival in France and the Grand Prix auto race in Monaco.
Neiman was a self-described bath city centre hotels workaholic who seldom took vacations and had no hobbies. He worked daily in his New York City home studio at the Hotel des Artistes near Central Park that he shared with his wife of more than 50 years, Janet.
One face he recorded over and over again was that of Muhammad Ali. Those painting and sketches, representing bath city centre hotels 15 years of the prizefighter s professional life, permanently reside at the LeRoy Neiman bath city centre hotels Gallery at the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Ky.
Over the years, Neiman has endowed a number of institutions, donating $6 million in 1995 for the creation of the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University and $3 million to his alma mater, the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught for a decade.