Andy Warhol. Love, Sex, and Desire. Drawings

Much before Andy Warhol's ascent to the top of Pop Art, he created and exhibited seductive drawings that celebrated masculine beauty. Andy Warhol Love, Sex, & Desire: Drawings 1950–1962 features more than three hundred drawings primarily in ink on paper that depict young men, many nude, some sexually charged, and occasionally adorned with whimsical black hearts and charming accoutrements. They rest or strut, proud or even bored of their beauty, as the artist draws them, engrossed. They rarely interact with their keen observer, and in the same way, Warhol focuses on their form, their erotic qualities, and their unbridled sexuality. If his subjects are content to revel in their appeal, so too is Warhol. His confident hand illustrates a multitude of colorful characters but also reveals much about this enigmatic artist.

Warhol was already a booming commercial illustrator when he exhibited studies from this body of work at the Bodley Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side in 1956. He mistakenly saw these illustrations as his way to break into the New York art scene, underestimating the pervasive homophobia of the time. While he never saw his plan to publish the drawings as a monograph come to fruition, he did produce over one thousand life drawings, elegant and seemingly effortless. This volume finally brings his project to fruition by gathering his most impactful images, published here for the first time in a comprehensive book and chosen by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Edited and with an introduction by the Foundation’s Michael Dayton Hermann and essays by Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik and art critic Drew Zeiba. The inclusion of poems by James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Harold Norse, Essex Hemphill, and Allen Ginsberg creates moments of introspection, expanding upon the themes and moods present in the drawings.