ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987)
Muhammad Ali, 1978
61.5 x 61.5 cm (24 x 24 in)
Materials: Gouache and silkscreen inks on paper
Markings: Stamped by the Estate of Andy Warhol and numbered A1044.113 verso.
Additional Notes: Looking at Muhammad Ali, one can almost hear the boxer's famous, defiant statement - 'I am the greatest!' Executed in 1977, Warhol's picture of Muhammad Ali shows the boxer at the height of his fame and talents. At that point he was - for the third time - the World Boxing Association Heavyweight Champion. After more than a decade of professional bouts, he remained able to stun his opponents with his agility, winning fight after fight. Warhol has chosen to portray this giant of boxing, this sporting hero, in a combative pose; the raised fists are the tools of his trade, the attributes, his only necessary paraphernalia - they are the raw materials with which the boxer made his name and reputation. Muhammad Ali is presented here as a Pop icon, a god of the modern age, a contemporary hero. Significantly he is presented as a contemporary black hero, marking Warhol's detached yet significant participation in the race politics of his day. This is one of the first major celebrations of a black hero in American art, and as such in part prefigures the paintings of Warhol's protege, Jean Michel Basquiat who would become determined to place black heroes at the centre of art, having noticed to what extent they had been neglected or excluded for centuries prior to that. Even the presence of the African-American in art thanks to George Bellows had been relatively fleeting and had occured over half a century earlier. This is Cassius Clay, named after a famous abolitionist and subsequently adopting the religion of Islam, and becoming a prominent member of the Nation of Islam. This is Muhammad Ali, the friend and colleague of Malcolm X. This is Muhammad Ali who, as Victor Brokis recalled during the photoshoot in the boxing camp in Deerlake, Pennsylvania, lectured Warhol on Islam, race and politics. The boxer's own realisation of the importance of his entry into the Warholian pantheon is reflected by his reaction to learning that Warhol's pictures were usually sold for $25,000 at that time: 'Look at me! White people gonna pay twenty-five thousand dollars for my picture! This little negro from Kentucky couldn't buy a fifteen hundred-dollar motorcycle a few years ago and now they pay twenty-five thousand dollars for my picture!' (Ali, quoted in V. Bokris, 'The Perfect Interview: The Ali-Warhol Tapes', Gadfly, April 1999). Here, Ali's sense of humour and of irony is evident in this glee at becoming the subject for an establishment luxury object, the ultimate example of the worm that turned. It comes as little suprise to find that Warhol was not a sports fan. That said, Muhammad Ali was one sportsman who had long fascinated the artist, partly because of his incredible celebrity status and partly because of the violence of boxing. Warhol's Diaries reveal this latter aspect of his fascination when he records his reactions to the events surrounding a glamorous bout held a few years after the portrait of Muhammad Ali was executed: 'I couldn't watch it,' he claimed, then admitting that he was so affected by the tension that, 'I ate all my fingers on one side' (A.Warhol, 2 October 1980, quoted in ed Pat Hackett, The Andy Warhol diaries, New York, 1989, p.331). On that occasion, Warhol's evening was further punctuated by violence when on his return home, he and his friends passed the scene of a murder, a strange and bitter coda that rammed home a sense of the grittiness underlying the previous entertainment. Warhol himself was shot and had for a while been interested in the tension violence evokes. There is a coolness to the Warholian perspective on violence that finds a strange echo in Ali's own matter of fact words about boxing: 'It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up' (M. Ali, quoted in New York Times, April 6, 1977). By the time Warhol created Muhammad Ali, he was himself enough of a celebrity that, rather than rely on the found images that had been his source material earlier in his career, he was able to photograph the boxer in person. Ali was one of the greatest sportsmen in the world, as is proven by his continued status as a revered elder statesmen of the boxing ring. Warhol himself recognised the status that, in the age of televised sports coverage, these heroes of pitch, field and ring had attained: 'I said that the atheletes were better than movie stars and I don't know what I'm talking about because atheletes are the new movie stars' (A. Warhol, quoted in Andy Warhol: The Athelete Series, exh. cat., London, 2007, p.76). The apothesis of Muhammad Ali into the realm of Warhol's gods and heroes marked a further endorsement, as the sports hero was raised, in the grand old tradition of Stubbs and Munnings, onto a pedestal in the world of art.
