PORTRAITS OF A MODERN MYTHOLOGY

1.  Imagine a contemporary artist whose portrait heads rival the painterly sophistication of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, but on a scale normally associated with the stone monoliths of Easter Island.

You end up with Alexander Van Armstrong. 

This mid career maestro is both a portrait painter and a history painter.

He is best known for his giant portrait heads of African American icons like Joe Louis and Jack Johnson. Other works include small portraits of composers and painters; and medium size nudes.

Last but not least is Nemesis, an audacious essay in history painting.

2.  Van Armstrong's work on the human body shares a quantum of artistic DNA with Bacon and Freud, but informed by a more romantic spirit.

Unlike either this British painter adopted the huge scale and energy of post 1950 New York painting.

Few have managed so convincingly to fuse the raw energy of action painters like Jackson Pollock to the ethos of European Expressionism.

The big surprise is how Van Armstrong tempers all the high voltage stuff with chiaroscuro and sfumato, refinements associated with Old Masters like Leonardo and Rembrandt.

The artist lives in the South of France.

3.  His career is a tale of two cities : LONDON and NEW YORK.

He has had success on both sides of the Atlantic having his work privately funded by notable individuals - a common arrangement during the Renaissance.

Given the cinematic power of Van Armstrong's biggest pieces, it's no surprise that a film director, Spike Lee, is one of his biggest fans.

Lee owns 30 of Van Armstrong’s paintings, including giant portrait heads of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali and President Obama.

One of these, Joe Louis 2, recently wowed visitors to the Brooklyn Museum's "Creative Sources" exhibition of treasures from Spike Lee's collection. The Guardian Newspaper singled it out as one of the show's highlights.

Joe Louis 2 is set to feature in Spike Lee's new movie, "High and Low", an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's 1960s crime drama masterpiece of the same name. It will star Denzel Washington and Halle Berry. 

In Success and Failure of Picasso, British art historian John Berger talks about how some painters are inevitably drawn to tragic-heroic subject matter.

Van Armstrong is such a painter. He found in the epic struggle of men like Jack Johnson, Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali, the modern Promethean narrative that he was searching for.

For much of the 20th century the saga of the Heavyweight Champions was part of the fabric of American culture. It afforded a common currency, a heroic unifying mythology to a vast, young, restless nation.

Beginning in 1908, the careers of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali would impact the tumultuous evolution of American society.

1. As Ken Burns suggests in his documentary, Unforgivable Blackness, Jack Johnson was never forgiven for being the first black Heavyweight Champion. Hostility to Johnson cast a long shadow.

A generation later, Joe Louis found himself under constant pressure to avoid being associated with Jack Johnson.

By contrast, Muhammad Ali would consciously adopt Jack Johnson’s defiance. He paid a heavy price, alienating most of America, when, in the course of his first press conference, he declared - “I don’t have to be what you want me to be.” 

2. Jack Johnson won the Heavy Weight title in 1908, in the process, sending American society into convulsions. His conviction under the Mann Act in 1913 was of course racially motivated. It dogged him for the rest of his days.

Jack Johnson lived in the fast lane. He died in a highway accident in 1946.

1. In an age of multiple flickering images, it is a shock to behold the massive solemnity of Joe Louis 3.

One is struck by the overwhelming physical impact of such a painting. A closer look reveals that the painting is densely layered to an extraordinary degree, built up layer by layer, perhaps as many as 40 layers. 

Conventional expectations of portraiture and likeness are here transcended. A mysterious alchemy transmutes oil paint into flesh in such a way as to suggest what it felt like to be Joe Louis.

2.  Joe Louis’s victory over Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium in 1938 was hailed as a slap in the face for Nazi racial ideology.

The victory propelled Joe Louis to mythological status. Prisoners on death row were known to pray to Joe Louis to save them. Wartime America adopted him as a symbol of national unity.

For the record, Max Schmeling was no Nazi. In fact, he later fell out with Hitler, who insisted he dump his Jewish manager. Schmeling refused.

After the war, Joe Louis and Max Schmeling became good friends and remained so for the rest of their respective lives.

1.  The 1960's did not invent screaming. It's just that there was more of it. People screamed at the Beatles. They screamed at the Rolling Stones. But there was another scream. It belonged to Muhammad Ali. When? His first fight with Sonny Liston, Miami 1964. 

A split second after he realized that, against all the odds, he was the new Heavyweight Champion of the World, Muhammad Ali emitted a scream that went around the World.

It had none of the existential angst of Edvard Munch’s Scream, nor the sinister overtones of Francis Bacon’s Screaming Popes. No. This was a scream of athletic release, mixed with hysteria and shock. 

2.  Muhammad Ali and The Beatles first met shortly before the Liston fight. Ali did not take them seriously until he learnt how much money they were making. “ You’re not as dumb as you look,” he observed.

Little did they know that they and the likes of Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger were about to reshape the political and cultural landscape of the 1960s.

Tragically the peace movement lost out to the Military Industrial Establishment. 

As Muhammad Ali had stuck his neck out furthest in opposition to the Vietnam War, The Establishment punished him the most. They took away his title, his boxing license and with it, his right to make a living. He was exiled for 3 years.

3.  Mick Jagger was no stranger to screaming. In fact he could scream quite a bit. His incendiary performance of Sympathy for the Devil, from 1969, attests to this. Was the angst real or was it performance art?

4.  There was no screaming going on around Sonny Liston.

Liston was considered the scariest man on the planet. The so called Mephistopheles of boxing was believed to be impervious to physical pain.

But there are other kinds of pain.

What gnawed at Liston was the knowledge that the redemption he longed for was beyond his reach. The Fates were against him.

No one, not even his mother, knew exactly when he was born. No one was exactly sure when he died. 

He was The King of Pain.

5.  At 24 feet wide and 8 feet tall, The King of Pain is one of the most extreme paintings of our time.

It reprises Francis Bacon's adoption of the triptych as a formal device, while preserving much of the poignancy of Bacon's heads. But at 100 times life size, it does so on an unprecedented scale. Sonny Liston is treated sympathetically.

Like many of the Monumental Heads, The King of Pain echoes the pathos of Shelley’s famous sonnet Ozymandias, which reflects on the idea of human grandeur erased by the sands of time.