Jeff Haney checks out a gallery exhibit that features some legendary figures of the card game, which happens to coincide with a championship tournament

Friday, June 2, 2006 | 7:20 a.m.

Where: Jack Gallery in Mandalay Bay

When: 6-9 p.m. tonight

What: "The Legends of Poker" art exhibit

In his 40 years in the art business, Jack Solomon has always embraced what he calls a "populist vision" of art, or giving the people what they want.

These days, Solomon said, they want poker.

"The art business has changed," said Solomon, owner of the S2 gallery in the Las Vegas Arts District downtown. "People want art that reflects their lifestyle, not art for art's sake."

Poker's booming popularity - in home games and on television as well as in casino cardrooms - made it a natural fit as the subject of a gallery exhibition, Solomon said.

Tonight at Mandalay Bay, Solomon's latest vision will be realized. Some of poker's most prominent personalities are scheduled to attend the opening night preview of "The Legends of Poker," an exhibition of poker artwork by contemporary artists.

Former world champions Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan and Amarillo Slim Preston will be on hand to greet visitors and sign posters and lithographs featuring their likenesses, based on photographs by gaming analyst and photojournalist Larry Grossman.

Three-time world champion Stu Ungar, also immortalized in a lithograph based on Grossman's work, will be represented by Madeline and Stefanie Ungar, his widow and daughter. Ungar, the World Series of Poker winner in 1980, 1981 and 1997, died a year after his final championship.

Lithographs by Grossman and other artists featured in the exhibition were produced on the antique, hand-pulled lithography presses at the S2 gallery, priceless machines that Solomon compares to Stradivarius violins.

"This will totally eclipse, and forever put to rest, 'Dogs Playing Poker,' " Grossman said, referring to the rec-room staple depicting anthropomorphized pooches that was originally created by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge and - rather unfortunately - at times reproduced on black velvet.

"There are 50 (million) to 80 million poker players in America now," Grossman said. "You hear more and more about people converting their garage, or a room in their house, to a poker room, and a lot of them really have a strong interest in this kind of art."

Tonight's opening, from 6 to 9 at Jack Gallery, coincides with the Mandalay Bay Poker Championship, the latest major tournament on the World Poker Tour. The public is welcome, and the free exhibit is expected to run for three weeks.

Among the artists whose work will be represented are Waldemar Swierzy of Warsaw, Poland, Matt Rinard of New Orleans and Todd Goldman of Clearwater, Fla., whose first painting exhibition, "The Stupid Factory," made its debut in Las Vegas in 2004.

The exhibit's artwork ranges from original paintings to posters and prints in the $20 range, suitable for those garage poker parlors.

Grossman and his collaborator, graphic digital artist Craig DeThomas, have produced works that hang in the Bellagio, Harrah's and Sunset Station. Tonight's event marks the first time the subjects of their artwork will gather for a gallery exhibition.

"I'm fortunate that I've been friends with these players for years, and they all agreed to allow my photos to be enhanced," said Grossman, who has lived in Las Vegas since 1988 and hosted the gambling radio show "You Can Bet On It" for 16 years.

Grossman also had a hand in a new piece to be revealed tonight, which portrays Mount Rushmore, but with the faces of Brunson, Ungar, Phil Hellmuth and Chan in place of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln.

Hellmuth just made the cut, edging old-timer Johnny Moss, Grossman said.

"Phil very much resonates with the public, and with his nine (World Series) bracelets, it was certainly justified," Grossman said.

S2's flatbed presses, built about 1870 in Paris, ensure each lithograph is of museum quality, Solomon said. Of six such machines remaining in the world, Solomon owns five of them.

"The quality is far superior to any computer program or offset press," Solomon said. "It's the same thing with a Stradivarius - modern science might not be able to figure out what makes it sound so good, but all the artists want to work with them ... It's a lost art form, but one we're preserving."

So the fine art featured in "The Legends of Poker" might well eclipse Coolidge's cigar-chomping Dobermans and bluff-running St. Bernards, as Grossman suggests.

Yet there's still a playful element at work here. Rinard, in particular, is known for his quirky and ironic style. In fact, some of his paintings portray colorful cartoonlike creatures shooting craps, feeding slot machines and even - yep - dogs playing poker.