One Fine Show: ‘Strike Fast, Dance Lightly’ at the Norton Museum of Art

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

A recent rewatch of Raging Bull (1980) pushed it into my top three for Martin Scorsese. Though shot in black and white—either because it is a period piece or as an homage to Federico Fellini because it does feel like something he could have made—the movie explores a colorful array of topics, from twisted masculine sexuality to the all-consuming nature of American entertainment. It is not actually so much about boxing, though Robert DeNiro’s Jake LaMotta is so self-destructive that you begin to welcome the scenes where someone else is abusing him.

So much can be done with the subject of boxing, as demonstrated too by “Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing,” recently opened at the Norton Museum of Art. The group show features more than 100 artworks, most of them contemporary, though the exhibition reaches back to the era when boxing was one of the primary diversions with some nice Eadweard Muybridge collotypes and a rich and lonely watercolor by Edward Hopper. And before we move on from the older artists, we have to flag George Bellows. It’s hard to look away from the otherworldly bodies in his Introducing John L. Sullivan (1923).

This is one of those museum exhibitions in which the theme and curation are so broad that there isn’t a real chorus, just a bunch of really cool guitar solos. Ed Paschke’s Boxer with Masque (2004) threatens to be consumed by the tripped-out wallpaper behind him, and he may have just been knocked out, given his nauseating palette, psychedelic tattoos and the curious thing on his face. Jonas Wood’s Hit Man (2012) also creates a cool character, layering belt upon belt, texture upon texture, on his self-satisfied and veiny-armed fighter. I prefer these to the more prosaic stuff by people like Shaun Leonardo. And isn’t Ed Ruscha a hoot? In this show, he has a work titled I TOLD YOU NOBODY OUGHT NEVER TO FIGHT HIM (painting for John Steinbeck) (2023).

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Of course, women are able to do much with the subject. One of the best pieces in the show is an Artforum ad from 1970 by Judy Chicago. In it, Chicago leans against the ropes in gloves, wearing a sweatshirt that bears her recently changed name. Her newly signed dealer, Jack Glenn, looks on with one foot in the ring. She is one to bet on, as proven by well-chosen representations of boxers in the background and the photograph’s perfect composition.

This iteration of the show doesn’t feature any work by my favorite painter of boxing, Leroy Neiman, whose foundation I used to work with. Remember how Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed punch each other at the end of Rocky III (1982) and become a painting? Neiman did that painting. He was ringside at Madison Square Garden whenever there was a fight, and his swirling pigments have a hidden depth that show how deeply he’d studied the movements of fighters. One wonders if we’ll ever have an artist who manages to capture UFC with that kind of grace.

“Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing” is on view at the Norton Museum of Art through March 9, 2025.