Long before Andy Warhol reached the pinnacle of pop art, the artist created and exhibited fascinating drawings celebrating male beauty. Andy Warhol Love, Sex, & Desire: Drawings 1950-1962 presents more than three hundred drawings done primarily in ink on paper. Warhol portrayed young men, many nude, some overtly sexualised and sometimes sporting extravagant black hearts and fascinating ornaments. They are shown idly or strutting, proud or even bored with their beauty, as the artist sketches them in rapt attention. They rarely make eye contact with their enthusiastic observer, just as Warhol focuses on their form and erotic qualities. If it is enough for his models to revel in their attractiveness, so it is for the artist. His line is sure to portray a number of striking characters, but it also reveals a great deal about this enigmatic artist.

Warhol was already a commercial illustrator on the rise when he exhibited studies from this project at the Bodley Gallery on New York's Upper East Side in 1956. He was wrong to think that these illustrations would make him a household name in the city's art scene, as he underestimated the widespread homophobia of the time. He produced more than a thousand elegant and seemingly simple drawings from life, but his plan to collect them in a monograph was never realised. This comprehensive volume finally brings his project to fruition by bringing together his most striking images, published for the first time and selected in collaboration with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with an introductory text by editor Michael Dayton Hermann of the Andy Warhol Foundation, and essays by Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik and art critic Drew Zeiba. Poems by James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Harold Norse, Essex Hemphill and Allen Ginsberg create moments of introspection that amplify the themes and moods present in the drawings.

The style of the drawings evokes the sketches of Jean Cocteau and even Matisse, with a line that is as agile as it is refined and precise. Meanwhile, the mischievous voyeurism is Warhol-esque, and even the more daring drawings contain a kind of slapstick humour, a sense of ironic detachment that would become Warhol's personal trademark. His line is sure to portray a number of striking characters, but it also reveals a great deal about this enigmatic artist.

• Pages: 392
• Language: English
• Author: Drew Zeibra
• Year: 2020
• MODEL: 9783836574471

Publisher: Taschen