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PAINT THE TOWN WARHOL UNIQUE WORKS BY POP-ART ICON COME TO UMW

February 5, 2009 12:35 am

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.

Others, like Ali and Tom Seaver, were excited to be immortalized by the famous artist.

Each sports star sat for his or her portrait--and while things went well generally, Weisman recalled Nicklaus getting slightly annoyed by Warhol referring to his golf club as a "stick."

Simpson had come from a movie set, and was sporting a full beard.

"I told Andy that he didn't look right with the beard. I thought he looked like a criminal," Weisman remembered. "Andy said, 'No, he's beautiful.'"

In all, 10 athletes were frozen on canvas with Warhol's signature silk-screen-and-acrylic technique.

Weisman believes that many of the athletes gained a new appreciation for Warhol and art during the process, but it was a two-way street: Warhol was impressed by his subjects.

"Before he did those paintings, he wasn't a sports fan at all," Weisman said of Warhol. "Afterward, he started going to games. He became a hockey fan, and he loved the Rangers. The players loved him, too."

Warhol made eight unique sets of the 10 portraits, for a total of 80 portraits. Weisman gave each athlete his or her own painting, and donated one of each athlete to the respective sports halls of fame. He gave one set to his father, one to UCLA and one to the University of Maryland.

He kept four of the sets, which he intends to pass on to his children.

When the athlete portraits made their gallery debut in 1977, art critics were less than impressed.

"I just put that to the point of the art people not knowing about this sports thing," Weisman said. "There was a little bit of pushing and tugging over the sports theme at the time, but that really doesn't matter."

In his opinion, the project did exactly what he intended--it opened the world of fine art to a new audience.

"Wherever we've gone, you'll find people who come in who have never been to a museum before," he said. "It was a success in every regard."

Although Weisman dismisses the monetary significance of the paintings, they certainly carry some weight in that regard, despite the criticism they first received. In 2007, an original Warhol "Ali" sold at auction for $9.22 million.

Impressive? Sure, but so is getting an up-close look at the paintings.

Warhol fans and sports fans will find common ground in this collection, and Director of University Galleries Anne Timpano thinks this is a great opportunity for the Fredericksburg community.

"It is an unusual event for us to have items of this renown in our gallery," she said.

Jonas Beals: 540/368-5036
Email: jbeals@freelancestar.com