GUEST: Hugh Hefner had donated this and the magazine to back up the story behind it about 35 years ago, and we were at the Cherry Auction and decided to go ahead and bid on it. Then won it.
APPRAISER: Wow. Well today you've brought in a LeRoy Neiman. What do you know about LeRoy Neiman?
GUEST: I don't know very much.
APPRAISER: Okay.
GUEST: I only know that pictures like this, there's few of em. Otherwise, it's all sports oriented or maybe sports figures.
APPRAISER He was a very popular artist. He was originally from Saint Paul, Minnesota and actually studied here in Chicago at The Art Institute. His claim to fame was painting all kinds of sports events and he did portraits for some famous people. So whether it was Muhammad Ali or Sylvester Stallone. And in fact, LeRoy Neiman was actually in three of the Rocky movies because…
GUEST: Oh, he was?
APPRAISER: …he knew Stallone.
GUEST: I didn't know that.
APPRAISER: So that was kind of quirky. But his other claim to fame is the fact that he was an illustrator for Playboy Magazine, and he did that for about 15 years. This was done for an article that Neiman was writing about in his travels to Morocco.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: The title of the piece is East Meets West. And so, you've got the young American woman versus the Moroccan woman. And it is in fact in color in the magazine, in the issue January 1970 for Playboy. In terms of the condition, we've got a little bit of a bulge here.
GUEST: Mm-hmm
APPRAISER: And you can see that the signature, which is here is below the mat and that's because the piece has actually slipped. So you can see that its…
GUEST: Oh.
APPRAISER: ...slipped in the mat.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: So you need to definitely have this taken out and repositioned and perhaps they can also flatten that bulge. The other things that are interesting are these little pencil marks here, which of course probably relate to the illustration and what was going to be shown.
GUEST: Oh, I see. I thought they were marks, just dirt…
APPRAISER: Yeah, but I think they were like an advertising or in any kind of illustration…
GUEST: Oh.
APPRAISER: They often have sort of signals to the publisher, so.
GUEST: I learned a lot, wow.
APPRAISER: What did you pay for this?
GUEST: It's a long time, but I'm thinking around $300.
APPRAISER: $300?
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: Well Neiman died in 2012.
GUEST: Yes
APPRAISER: And his work has continued to be popular. In terms of the Playboy subjects, the drawings that make the most money would be ones that actually show Playboy Bunnies. That being said, this is an actual illustration for the magazine and I think that a gallery would probably ask in the range of $10,000.
GUEST: Really? I paid $300.
APPRAISER: Yeah.
GUEST: That's wonderful.
APPRAISER: So you did very well.
GUEST: Oh, yes.
