Two American icons, one flamboyant and outsize; the other reticent and enigmatic, boxer Muhammad Ali and Pop artist Andy Warhol are the odd couple subjects in the Jackson Fine Art exhibition “Steve Schapiro: Warhol and Ali.”
Steve Schapiro photographed countless famous subjects over the span of his six decade-long career before his death in 2022 at age 87 — Streisand, Brando, Bowie and James Baldwin. He was also a notable civil rights photographer, chronicling ‘60s marches and public figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy as well as the anonymous figures behind that movement.
For this exhibition Jackson Fine Art has taken a stab at pairing two of Schapiro’s celebrity subjects in ways that can seem both serendipitous and somewhat random. The pair are united in their uniquely American-style celebrity, both humble-born men whose innate talents would allow them to rise to fame’s summit in the 1960s. Schapiro creates his own interesting connective tissue: a candid approach that humanizes both men, allowing us to peek behind the armor of their celebrity.
Credit: Steve Schapiro
Credit: Steve Schapiro
Though Schapiro wasn’t there to chronicle it, Warhol and Ali were united in real life, too. In 1977 Warhol photographed Ali for his “Athletes” series. Author Davis Miller remembered Ali’s thrilling to the idea of those Warhol portraits selling for $25,000, a king’s ransom at the time. “Look at me! White people gonna pay 25,000 dollars for my picture!”
The collaboration between Warhol and Schapiro was, gallery text points out, significantly timed in the mid-Sixties, as Warhol transformed from a Pop art painter to a cultural phenomenon, the string puller behind the ur-art band the Velvet Underground, art house films and flamboyant Factory superstars like Candy Darling and Ultra Violet. Schapiro was assigned to capture Warhol’s impact for Life magazine, though the story never ran.
Credit: Steve Schapiro
Credit: Steve Schapiro
The Cassius Clay (he would change his name to Muhammad Ali in 1964) Schapiro photographed on assignment for Sports Illustrated was in formation as well, says Jackson gallery director Courtney Coco Conroy.
“Both men are not yet ‘calcified’ in the public eye, she says, but were instead “on the cusp of being what they are today.”
Just 21 at the time, Clay is a kid on the precipice of worldwide fame goofily, gamely mugging for Schapiro’s camera. “He really was extremely quiet and incredibly polite — in every way, just a terrific person,” Schapiro wrote of that encounter with Ali.
Credit: Steve Schapiro
Credit: Steve Schapiro
Absurdly handsome, with the wasp waist and broad shoulders of a Ken doll, the images of Ali are adorable as when he interacts with neighborhood children in his Louisville, Kentucky, home, including a 6-year-old Lonnie Williams, who would eventually become his wife. The images can also strike a bittersweet note — as Ali poses in bed adopting a flexing muscle man pose, a funny grimace on his face — considering what we now know of his later degeneration from Parkinson’s disease.
In Schapiro’s viewfinder, both Warhol and Ali reveal reserves of appealing goofiness.
Though he would later become notoriously circumspect and cryptic, famous for his breathy, blankly effusive exclamation “wow,” Warhol seen through Schapiro’s lens is also a bit of a nut. He is an ordinary artist in New York observed in his art studio, toting his duffle bag around New York or cocktailing with muse Edie Sedgwick and posing with Nico and the Velvet Underground. In “Andy Warhol Mimes Margaret Keane ‘Waif’,” the artist assumes a campy pose, mocking the wide-eyed doom-posture of that ‘60s guttersnipe.
Credit: Steve Schapiro
Credit: Steve Schapiro
“Steve Schapiro: Warhol and Ali” is the final show in the current Jackson space before the gallery moves across Shadowlawn Avenue to a larger multi-story, newly constructed building where the first exhibition will feature a mix of local and national artists.
ART REVIEW
“Steve Schapiro: Warhol and Ali”
Through March 18. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, and by appointment. Free. Jackson Fine Art, 3115 East Shadowlawn Ave., Atlanta. 404-233-3739, jacksonfineart.com.
Bottom line: An appealing, sometimes non-sequitur combo of superstars Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali in the early Sixties, both subjects of Steve Schapiro’s charming black and white images.
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