A Dramatic Use of Color

The Art of Martin Kreloff

By Cynthia Robins

Adjacent the Cashman Center on North Las Vegas Boulevard and bounded by Bonanza and Washington are four museums, a public library and a Shakespearean theater company. In the aggregate, they comprise the Las Vegas Cultural Corridor.

Until last August the buildings were a vague and unbranded collection of concrete and steel without a unifying concept. The Las Vegas Arts Commission, eager to remedy this urban ennui, put out a call for artists (local and national) to submit their visions for providing the area an unforgettable visual identification.

The winning blueprint included a decorative flyover bridge, a series of sidewalk inlays, or “flourishes,” by Denise Duarte and 60 large banners festooning the light poles along the boulevard.

The man with the winning plan was Las Vegas artist Martin Kreloff, 67, a Vegas transplant with roots in Brooklyn, Coconut Grove, Fla., and San Francisco. His oppy-poppy style — a marriage of bright colors, easily identifiable shapes and heavy black outlines — is as well-suited to the main thrust of his art — portraits of show business icons — as it is the iconography of Las Vegas’ cultural institutions.

“I read online that the city was sending out a request for a local artist to design the banners for the cultural corridor,” Kreloff recalls. His conceptual response was “Pole Dancers,” a banner series featuring hands (navy blue or black) and representative symbols of each museum or facility against a vivid cadmium yellow background.

Kreloff met with the director of each institution to understand “what they saw as the most important quality of their institution that I could translate into something visual. Then I put it in my mental pressure cooker and came up with the concept that culture is the achievement of humanity, the highest achievement we have — that the hands of humanity give information from one person to another. I chose the hands to tell the story.” He illustrated his proposal with the letters L.I.B.R.A.R.Y. tumbling from one hand to another. A banner for the old Mormon Fort features a hand toting a bucket of water.

“What I am trying to do is visually brand our culture,” he says. “It’s not a big step from everything else I’ve done. I want to see that Las Vegas is coming into its own culturally with the Smith Center opening (this spring) and a variety of other cultural events. I see Las Vegas being in a very similar place to where Miami was in the 1970s — a medium-sized city that suddenly understands what (its) role is in culture and what the role of culture is to (the) city.”

Kreloff previously designed vivid murals and banners for the Greater Miami Opera, Royal Caribbean International, the Circus Circus casino and a massive billboard in San Francisco’s Castro District for an AIDS charity. But creating and overseeing the manufacture of the corridor banners is his biggest project yet.

More often than not, you can find him at his easel, where a Hollywood icon’s portrait is emerging from a huge square of canvas.

“When I was a kid, I fell in love with movies, especially Disney cartoons,” he says. “They were as meaningful to me as anything I was experiencing in real life. Why? The fantasy. I was a quiet child. I drew. I colored. I listened to music. I may have grown up in Brooklyn, but I lived in fantasy from the time when I was 12 years old and went to my first Broadway show — Ethel Merman in ‘Happy Hunting’ — which added live theater to the mix.”

Originally, Kreloff wanted to be an actor. But from the age of 5, he’d demonstrated an ability to draw pictures that looked like real people. It was the Jewish theater superstar Molly Picon, and the influence of New York Times theatrical cartoonist Al Hirschfeld, that pointed Kreloff in the right direction. He met Picon when she was on Broadway in Jerry Herman’s musical, “Milk and Honey.”

Kreloff’s uncle, Manny Fleishman, was the musical director for the Yiddish Theater and had worked with Picon many times. “I interviewed her for my Erasmus High School newspaper,” Kreloff says. “I went to the show and then backstage afterwards, and I took my drawing portfolio to show her. She said, ‘My God, are you talented!” She put the young Marty in touch with costume designer Miles White.

“Going to Miles’ house was like going to see Auntie Mame,” Kreloff remembers. “A Fifth Avenue address; everything super-sophisticated and super smart. He offered me a cigarette and I was such a nerd and said, ‘I’m too young to smoke.’ I showed him my drawings, and he told me I was incredibly talented and asked me what I wanted to do.” Kreloff told him: “I want to get the best education I can.” The dean of the Parsons School of Design was a friend of White’s and set up an appointment for Kreloff. “I went with my portfolio and was accepted and given a partial scholarship.”

Kreloff credits his affection for show business stars and his near-cartoon-like style to Hirschfeld’s weekly theatrical images for The Times. The artist would hide the name of his daughter, Nina, in his drawings — in the folds of a sleeve, the hair — and “the Nina count was the first thing I did when I picked up the paper. So here I am at 12 in 1956,” Kreloff recalls, “and I am being bombarded with a variety of images that played to my fantasy. So my work was shaped by Hirschfeld and Walt Disney studios. I learned about line, form and color not only in school but in a darkened theater and from the pages of a newspaper.”

In 1967, his parents moved the family to Dade County. Kreloff enrolled at the University of Miami, eventually took his degree and attended graduate school, while working as a catering waiter and in menswear sales among other jobs. He also began doing illustration work for the Miami Herald, eventually creating covers for the Sunday Tropic magazine. His art made him as famous in Miami as the socialites and celebrities he had been serving. In 1976, he had his first solo show: “Miami Says Art.” He photographed 200 famous Miamians saying “Art.” Later, he did 30 individual drawings. The show “put me on the map,” Kreloff says.

Now it’s “Las Vegas Says Art” that keeps Kreloff busy raising funds and compiling lists of prominent politicians, celebrities, philanthropists, artists, producers, casino owners and the like. Eventually, the list will be winnowed to 30 stellar images, all in Kreloff’s colorful style.

The movie star images Kreloff started painting in the late ‘70s — Lana Turner, Errol Flynn, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, among them -- are both his signature art and his forte. His most recent include a gorgeous portrait of sigh-inducing George Clooney on a bright orange background, Lucille Ball in all her red-headed glory and the Janet Leigh “Psycho” shower scene scream. Entertainment producers have commissioned a number of Kreloff’s celebrity images, including the one of Lauren Bacall. “She was coming to Miami, touring in ‘Wonderful Town,’” he says. “I painted her as she looked in ‘The Big Sleep’ with those sleepy eyes and that hair. The producer, Zev Buffman, asked if it was OK with me to give Bacall the paintings. “Better still,” Buffman added, “why don’t the two of us present it?”

“I still have this photograph, me in a three-piece ‘John Travolta’ suit from the ‘70s and she’s in this cocktail outfit. God, I was so young then. And I said the stupidest thing I’ve ever said: ‘Oh dear, I wasn’t even born then.’ And she turned to me — cut me dead — and said, ‘Never say that again.’”