The man who clicked with the art world

A number of years ago, the photographer Arnold Newman's wife received a strange call. "Sorry, Mrs Newman, your husband's not going to be coming home tonight," said the voice. "He'll be coming home tomorrow. He's got a date with Marilyn Monroe."

The man in question was the celluloid blonde's analyst. Yet, despite his prediction, Newman did make it back to his spouse that evening. "Marilyn was the one girl I would never want to be mixed up with," Newman tells me in his New York office. "She was trouble. She was terribly erratic and terribly confused. One of the unhappiest women I've ever met."

Newman is considered by many to be one of the 20th century's greatest portrait photographers. He is certainly one of the most prolific. He has photographed every American president since Truman and did Lyndon B Johnson's official portrait. For years, he worked for Life and Harpers Bazaar, has snapped the likes of Haile Selassie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marlene Dietrich and Franco, and in 1978 was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to photograph "The Great British" - 50 portraits of politicians, writers, composers and artists.

It is for his portraits of artists that Newman is most famous. Over the past 60 years, he has photographed more than 200 and his list of subjects reads like a Who's Who of 20th century art: Picasso, Mondrian, Miro, Chagall, Dali, Braque, Giacometti, De Chirico, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning. "In the beginning, they were my heroes," he explains. "They were the people I'd studied and they were taking me in. It was a miracle."

At the start of his career, in 1941, he photographed Fernand Léger. The following year, Marcel Duchamp and Mondrian posed for him. "Mondrian didn't have a sou," Newman remembers. "The poor guy was dependent upon his friends to help him out. He couldn't sell his paintings for $250!" On their second meeting, Mondrian offered Newman two small drawings. One of them was the sketch for one of the artist's most acclaimed works, Broadway Boogie Woogie. Before he was famous, Jackson Pollock offered him a large painting for just $150. "I was broke," says Newman ruefully. "Today, it's worth millions!" Often, one artist would introduce him to another. Visiting Giacometti in Paris, he ended up at the Deux Magots, where they were joined by Chagall. Other artists he photographed, such as Man Ray, became friends.

Newman has lived on Manhattan's West Side, in the same building, since 1948. At 82, he is opinionated and out-spoken. He tells you about the problems with his hearing aids, two sisters who want him to photograph them in the nude and the fact that his wife was smuggling guns for Palestine when he met her. In his eyes, Cindy Sherman is "a great make-up artist and a lousy photographer".

Newman was born in New York in 1918 and brought up in Atlantic City. He studied art at the University of Miami, had to drop out when the Depression hit and ended up getting a job in a photo studio in Philadelphia. Within no time, he had borrowed his uncle's camera, started taking pictures (his early graphic, abstract work is particularly beautiful) and decided he wanted to photograph people in their own environment. In September 1941, he was offered his first show. The curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art turned up and selected a print for the museum's collection.

There have naturally been disappointments and those who got away. Mark Rothko cancelled a session shortly before committing suicide and Einstein died four days before their appointment. Still, Newman is not complaining. "I've had a full life and a lot of fun," he asserts.

Arnold Newman is at HackelBury Fine Art, 4 Launceston Place, W8 until 21 December