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Warhol and sports superstars are coming to Fredericksburg Date published: 2/5/2009
BY JONAS BEALS Andy Warhol, an icon of 20th-century art, became famous for painting icons--from tomato soup cans to Marilyn Monroe. In the late '70s, he presented a collection of colorful portraits featuring sports stars of the day. Those paintings--and the man who commissioned them--will be at the University of Mary Washington's Ridderhof Martin Gallery Tuesday evening. Richard Weisman, an avid art collector and friend of Warhol, chose the subjects himself: Muhammad Ali, Pele, O.J. Simpson, Dorothy Hamill and Jack Nicklaus, among others. UMW will present the 10 athlete portraits, along with three other Warhol works. Weisman will attend the opening, and will be signing his book "From Picasso to Pop: The Richard Weisman Collection." He doesn't remember exactly how he broached the subject with Warhol in 1976--they might have been on a plane, or maybe in a taxi. Weisman was a friend of the famous pop artist, and had plenty of opportunities to bend his ear. Although Warhol had done portraits of countless people, famous or otherwise, Weisman saw a gap in Warhol's portfolio. "I suggested to Andy that it would be nice to do sports figures," Weisman said. "He thought it was a great idea." Weisman is modest about his influence on the project. "It's not that he didn't want to paint sports figures," Weisman said. "It's just that no one around him was into that sort of thing. I was into sports. If someone had suggested it to him five years earlier, he probably would have done it. Andy was game." It cost Weisman $800,000 to commission the portraits of the sports figures. While there was a financial component to his decision--Weisman admits that he has certainly recouped his money--the art collector had other reasons to connect art to athletics. "I felt that they were the two most popular leisure activities, but they were separate worlds," he said. "I think it opened up Warhol and art to a whole segment of the world that had never had any exposure to it at all." Weisman had a hand in executing the project. He chose famous athletes who "even if you didn't like sports, you knew who they were." Some of the sports figures, like Nicklaus and Chris Evert, were wary of the proposition--and some, incredibly enough, had never heard of Warhol.
Read more stories about Fredericksburg Date published: 2/5/2009
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