Welcome to One Fine Show, where the Observer highlights an exhibit that recently opened at a museum outside of New York City, a place we know and love that is already getting a lot of attention.
A recent revision of the Angry Bull (1980) pushed it into my top three for Martin Scorsese. Although it's shot in black and white—either because it's a period piece or as an homage to Federico Fellini because it feels like something he could do—the film explores many colorful topics, from men's twisted sexuality to the most extreme. American entertainment genre. It's actually not so much about boxing, although Robert DeNiro's Jake LaMotta injures himself to the point where he begins to accept scenes where someone else is torturing him.
There's a lot that can be done with the subject of boxing, as shown by our “Slash Fast, Dance Slow: Artists in Boxing,” which recently opened at the Norton Museum of Art. The group exhibition includes more than 100 works of art, most of them contemporary, although the exhibition goes back to the era when boxing was one of the leading sports with the beautiful collotypes of Eadweard Muybridge and the rich and lonely watercolors of Edward Hopper. And before we move on to the older artists, we should give a shout out to George Bellows. It is difficult to look away from the foreign bodies of his own Introducing John L. Sullivan (1923).
This is one of those museum shows where the theme and arrangement is so broad that there is no actual music, just a collection of cool guitar chords. Photo by Ed Paschke A boxer with a mask (2004) he threatens to be eaten by the cut-out wallpaper behind him, and he may have just been released, thanks to his nauseating palette, psychedelic tattoos and a curious expression on his face. This is Jonas Wood's place Hit Man (2012) and creates a cool character, belt on belt, texture on texture, in his contented and veiny fighter. I prefer these to the more prosaic stuff of people like Shaun Leonardo. And isn't Ed Ruscha hot? In this exhibition, he has a work titled I TOLD YOU NO ONE SHOULD NOT FIGHT HER (painting by John Steinbeck) (2023).
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Of course, women can do a lot with the subject. One of the best pieces in the exhibition is Artforum advertisement from 1970 by Judy Chicago. In it, Chicago leans on the ropes of his gloves, wearing a sweatshirt with his newly changed name. His newly signed salesman, Jack Glenn, is watching with one foot in the ring. He is one to bet on, as evidenced by the well-chosen representations of the boxers in the background and the perfect composition of the image.
This iteration of the show does not feature the work of my favorite boxing artist, Leroy Neiman, whose foundation I used to work with. Remember how Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed beat each other at the end Rocky III (1982) and be a diagram? Neiman did that painting. He sat in Madison Square Garden whenever a fight was fought, and his swirling pigment has a subtle depth that shows how deeply he studied the fighters' movements. One wonders if we'll ever have an artist capable of capturing the UFC with that kind of grace.
“Hit Fast, Dance Slow: Artists in Boxing” is on view at the Norton Museum of Art until March 9, 2025.
