Pelé

Andy Warhol’s The Complete Athletes Series demonstrates the changing nature of fame in the 1970s, granting athletes the Pop Art treatment that was previously reserved for movie stars and musicians. Art collector Richard Weisman commissioned the portraits in 1977 with an ambitious goal in mind: he hoped to “inspire people who loved sport to come into galleries, maybe for the first time, and people who liked art would take their first look at a sports superstar" (R. Wiseman quoted in K. Casprowiak, "Warhol's Athlete Series Celebrity Sport Stars", Andy Warhol: The Athlete Series, London, 2007, p. 71). The series marked a new terrain for Warhol, who had little familiarity with sports. Nonetheless, he excelled, capturing the unique personalities and public personas of each sports figure. Warhol photographed eleven athletes, although only ten were ultimately depicted in series. The final series depicts O.J. Simpson, Dorothy Hamill, Pelé, Jack Nicklaus, Rod Gilbert, Muhammad Ali, Tom Seaver, Willie Shoemaker, Chris Evert, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, each an athletic legend in the 1970s. Warhol then applied silkscreen prints of the polaroid photos onto pre-painted canvases. Finally, he left forceful marks of paint, using a palette knife and his own fingers to manipulate the images. The result is a set of remarkably textured, highly-stylized and expressive portraits that draw upon Warhol’s longstanding fascination with celebrity.
In this portrait of a grinning Pelé, Warhol captures the international soccer star’s easy exuberance, freezing the beloved player’s charm and athleticism in a timeless silkscreen print. The series monumentalizes the athletes who defined a generation, with Pelé’s portrait rightfully cementing his place among the pantheon of not only soccer’s greatest talents but also worldwide celebrities. While Warhol transferred the image of a beaming Pelé triumphantly lifting a soccer ball in ink, the element driving the work’s essential joy remains the vivid strokes of paint. The angled turquoise brushstrokes radiating from the soccer ball are edged in streaks of white, alluding to spin and speed. This overwhelming effect of motion is one of the portrait’s most unique characteristics; the work is a sensual delight, with the eye whizzing through vigorous dashes around the ball, luxuriating in an atmosphere of flight and energy. Behind the Spalding ball marked with Pelé’s name, an expanse of cyan stretches across the top right half of the canvas, recalling a bright blue sky above a soccer pitch, while a swath of seagrass green fills Pelé’s shirt in the lower left half of the work. The colors of green and aqua are those of the New York Cosmos, a perfect allusion to Pelé’s team at the time of the work’s creation. Fittingly, the rest of the work was executed in black and white, the colors of Pelé’s first team where he began his meteoric rise, Santos FC. These happy coincidences of color and the encapsulation of speed and warmth the work embodies make Warhol’s portrait of Pelé one of the most visually delightful works in his Athletes series.
Despite transitioning from the glamorous circles of movie stars to the sports arena, Warhol showcases how popular athletes performed in the public eye. The Complete Athletes Series depicts its subjects with care, conveying each athlete’s charisma through bright, gestural brushstrokes.