Muhammad Ali

Andy Warhol Muhammad Ali portraits are rare range of artworks created by artist Andy Warhol.

He did what others thought impossible: freaked out Andy Warhol (1928-87). It happened, Victor Bockris reveals, at Fighter’s Heaven, a training camp in the hills of northern Pennsylvania. The graphic artist and painter had taken lots of photographs of Muhammad Ali in preparation for a commissioned portrait. At the end of the session, nervously extending a thin arm, Warhol mumbled: “Thanks er, champ.” The boxer spun round and furiously demanded: “Did you say tramp?” He then laughed—but not before Warhol had momentarily lost his super cool.

Warhol was further disconcerted when the people’s champion delivered an Alilogue, a rambling talk about gravity, meteorites, prostitution on the White House steps, jumping out of windows, Israel, Egypt, Zaire, South Africa, drugs, broken skulls, delusions, angel-food cake, yellow hair, Judgment Day, shattered morality, Jesus, boxing, Sweden, the Koran, friendship and Elvis. “Is he intelligent?” a dazed Warhol asked Mr Bockris afterwards: “I can’t figure it out.”

He would not have asked had he heard the boxer’s reaction to the portrait. “It is by far the best painting I have ever had of myself,” he said: “I can see many moods.” Mr Bockris, a chronicler of the New York art-and-rock scene and a friend of Mr Ali’s, has caught several of the moods in his slim, affectionate book about visits to the training camp in the early 1970s.