Named after the All-Star third baseman, Graig Nettles, Kreindler creates some truly incredible baseball art. What is just as impressive is the amount of research that goes into the pieces, which are mostly of players in the days before color photography. From his website: “His goal is to portray the national pastime in an era when players were accessibly human, and the atmosphere of a welcoming ballpark was just as important as what happened on the field. He is proud to act as a visual historian, recreating a history that he has never experienced, yet, like millions of fans, maintains a profound connection with.”
He is so impressive that he was commissioned by the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City to do a collection of more than 200 players. Unbeknownst to me before today, these have been collected in a book, Black Baseball in Living Color: The Artwork of Graig Kreindler, by Jay Caldwell.
This is, in fact, the second Bookshelf Conversation with Kreindler. The first was almost 10 years ago when his portrait of Lou Gehrig was unveiled at an exhibit at the Yogi Berra Museum to mark the 75th anniversary of the Iron Horse’s “Luckiest Man” speech. But our association goes back even further, to a story I did on him in 2007 for the New Jersey Jewish News.
I’m one of those who don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like. I was fortunate enough to visit the Louvre where I saw works by the masters painted hundreds of years ago. I wonder, if the world survives that long, if in a few hundred years people will look at Kreindler’s portraits of Babe Ruth, Satchel Paige, Mickey Mantle and scores of others with the same appreciation.
And apologies for the “one-sidedness” of the video. Technical difficulties and all that.
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