Warhol: The Athletes

Warhol: The Athletes is a series of ten portraits of famous athletes commissioned by Andy Warhol’s friend and collector Richard Weisman. The legendary artist, Andy Warhol, started by creating Polaroid portraits that he shot in his Manhattan studio or in the athletes’ homes. Using his signature screen-printing technique, Warhol printed the photos on canvas and embellished each of the 40-by-40-inch portraits with acrylic paint. His subjects, all painted in 1978, include NBA all-time scoring leader Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, golfing great Jack Nicklaus, figure-skating Olympic gold medalist Dorothy Hamill, boxing icon Muhammad Ali, and the infamous O. J. Simpson.

Though Warhol was more comfortable with rock stars and members of the fashion world, working with athletes provided an interesting and exciting departure for the artist, especially when one considers their position in the history of American celebrity. In Warhol’s own words, “the sports stars of today are the movie stars of yesterday.” Viewed in this light, Warhol: The Athletes represents a pivotal episode in Warhol’s astonishing and incisive career. It is also prophetic of the much deeper interactions that would occur between the arts and sports worlds in the decades to follow. As with so much in our current contemporary arts environment, it all goes back to Warhol.