“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” (Warhol) At the end of the 1970s one could witness an extraordinary rise of the athlete as a celebrity. At that time, Andy Warhol conceived his famous Athelete Series, from which the present lot’s image stems. ‘What began as a desire to unite two spheres of American culture inadvertedly captured a significant moment in sports history, the rapid escalation of the celebrity sport star, a phenomenon that continues to provide opportunity and inspiration to people from all backgrounds… Simultaneously, the sport celebrity is the subject of mass marketing, image production and selling ‘authenticity’. What could be more Warholian than that? It comes as no surprise that the forces that contributed to the rise of the sports star - television, branding and American leisure activities – are also the key propellants behind Andy Warhol’s work’. (ANDY WARHOL THE ATHELETE SERIES, Martin Summers Fine Art Ltd, London, exhibition dates 24 May 2007 – 6 July 2007, p.71) The present lot is a portrait by Andy Warhol of Muhammad Ali, one of the greatest and most celebrated heavyweight championship boxers of all time. For the Athlete Series Warhol only portrayed sports stars that got to the top of their respective fields through hard work, skill, talent and determination, which differentiated this series from his regular celebrity portraits; the sitters in the Athlete series conveyed a sense of authenticity. ‘Professional sports in the United States also represented the quintessential American Dream. Any person, regardless of race, gender or social stature had the opportunity to rise to the uppermost echelons of the game’ (ANDY WARHOL THE ATHELETE SERIES, Martin Summers Fine Art Ltd, London, exhibition dates 24 May 2007 – 6 July 2007, p.76). The notion of everyone being able to become a star and that the impossible is possible very much appealed to Warhol; his portraits convey this notion by the depicted looking straight out at us and engaging the viewer, almost asking the viewer to enter and become part of this dream. Andy Warhol was in love with fame, with the rich and the talented. This fascination with the universally popular, coupled with an extreme consciousness for the workings and influence of the media was further enhanced by the proliferation of images in the America of mass-media, consumerism and pop culture in the1960s and 70s. The media became to play a substantial part in the creation of icons and stars. The infatuation with images of stardom and idealized people triggered social aspirations for fame and wealth amongst the population. ‘Fame, according to Warhol, is what makes life livable. One can cool off in the sweet breeze of success’ (Suzi Gablik, ANDY WARHOL – PORTRAIT screenprints 1965-80, Arts Council of Great Britain’, 1981). In this image Muhammad Ali is notdepicted as a sportsman, he is presented as a contemporary icon, idealized and heightened to an almost mystical level. It is also important to note that he isshown as one of the first contemporary black heroes in American art, alluding to Warhol’s interest in the ongoing conflicts of racism in the United States at that time. Muhammad Ali is portrayed active and alert, raising his fists, the tools of his trade to which he owes his fame, in a combative pose. Wahol was fascinated by Ali as he achieved to raise from a humble background to become a star, but he was also intrigued by the sheer violence of boxing; violence was always an important subject in Warhol’s career, as seen in his Death and Disaster, especially after his near-death experience of 1968, when he was shot and from which he never really recovered. Warhol was also always interested in the media and its voyeuristic relationship with violence but he always achieved to convey a sense of objectivity and detachment in the representation of violence in his art works. In this regard Warhol saw a connection between him and Ali who stated in the New York Times on 6 April 1977: ‘It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound sand. I beat people up’. While playing with the artificial and idealized representation and the perception of the object, Warhol gives the viewer an unusual insight into contemporary American culture and life of that time.