Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
Muhammad Ali
stamped with the Estate of Andy Warhol and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. stamps and numbered 'FA05.00036' (on the reverse)
unique Polacolor Type 108 print
image: 3¾ x 2⅞in. (9.5 x 7.4cm.)
sheet: 4½ x 3⅜in. (10.7 x 8.7cm.)
Executed in 1977

Provenance:
Galleri Christian Larsen, Stockholm.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Specialist Notes:

The collector Richard Weisman knew Andy Warhol well when he approached him to produce a series of paintings featuring contemporary sports stars in 1977, which would become his Athlete Series of paintings. This Polaroid of Muhammad Ali was taken as part of this series, which also featured sports legends including Pelé, Jack Nicklaus and Dorothy Hamill. Executed in 1977, the image captures the boxer at the height of his fame: after more than a decade of professional bouts, Ali was World Boxing Association Heavyweight Champion for the third time.

Warhol took photographs of each athlete celebrity using his Polaroid Big Shot camera. In the present work we see Warhol playing with how to portray the boxer: the raised fist is the tool of his trade and the only necessary attribute needed to allude to his name and reputation.

Although Warhol was not a sports fan, Ali was one such athlete who fascinated him and whose presence on the New York social scene he noted in his Diaries. Warhol's Diaries reveal his enduring fascination with the boxer when in 1980 he remarked on an Ali match, ‘I couldn't watch it…I ate all my fingers on one side’ (A. Warhol, quoted in ‘2 October 1980’, in Pat Hackett (ed.), The Andy Warhol Diaries, New York 1989, p. 331). Warhol recognised the status that, in the age of televised sports coverage, these heroes of pitch, field and ring had attained: ‘I said that the athletes were better than movie stars and I don't know what I'm talking about because athletes are the new movie stars’ (A. Warhol, quoted in Andy Warhol: The Athlete Series, exh. cat., Martin Summers Fine Art, London, 2007, p. 76).

This work is featured in our How to Collect like a Tate Curator article – find out more here.

Please note this lot is the property of a consumer. See H1 of the Conditions of Sale.