PORTRAITS OF A MODERN MYTHOLOGY

1. Alexander Van Armstrong is a School Of London painter with a more Romantic take on the human condition than either Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud.

Philosophically and technically his work on the human body overlaps with the two older masters to quite a degree. This is evident in his nudes, and small portraits of Einstein, Beethoven, El Greco and Bacon.

Further, he has deep roots in the history of European painting stretching back to the early Quattrocento, the time of Masaccio. 

Given all this, many are baffled and intrigued by his giant portrait heads of old time Heavyweight Boxers. They ask - what drew him to such subject matter given that he is obviously not a sports artist?

Far removed from the arena of sport, the Giant Portrait Heads tackle tragic heroic themes to do with Promethean struggle. Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali are recast as monumental beings pursuing transcendence at the intersection of Mythology and History.

Poignant and solemn in equal measure, these huge portraits are characterized by powerful paint handling, tempered by sfumato and chiaroscuro - painterly refinements usually associated with Old Masters like Leonardo and Rembrandt.

2.  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 exhibition of Spike Lee's art collection. The Guardian Newspaper singled it out as one of the show's highlights.

Joe Louis 2 features in Spike Lee's new movie, "Highest 2 Lowest", a remake of an Akira Kurosawa 1960s crime drama. It stars Denzel Washington. The movie recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is scheduled for release in theaters August 22, 2025.

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. 

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.

Muhammad Ali's opposition to the Vietnam war cost him his title, his boxing license and with it his right to make a living.

Ali would have to wait until 1974 to regain his title, when he defeated George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire.

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.

Worse, Liston was controlled by the Mob. He knew it would end badly.

Liston was found dead in his Las Vegas home, in suspicious circumstances, late 1969. The official verdict was suicide.

A veteran crime reporter said it best: 

"Dontcha know, no one ever gets murdered in Vegas."

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.

Fiona Starr, M.A. Leeds University

April 2024