During the summer of 1952, a rising commercial illustrator named Andy Warhol was preparing to make his debut on the New York art scene. He had been working on a series of elegant line drawings celebrating queer love – a style and subject that couldn’t be less fitting to the American audience. Enthralled by hypermasculine ideals and Abstract Expressionist aesthetics, galleries balked at Warhol’s efforts to show his work but the then 24-year-old artist would not be denied.
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“Throughout his life, Warhol refused to be defined by social conventions,” says Michael Dayton Hermann, editor of Andy Warhol. Love, Sex, and Desire. Drawings 1950–1962(Taschen, November 2020). “John Giorno, artist, poet and Warhol’s former lover, explained, ‘Andy was a gay man and worked with the homoerotic. In the homophobic 1950s, this was daring and heroic. A great risk.’”
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The book brings together over 300 drawings rendered primarily in ink on paper of men reveling in the pleasure of youth, beauty, and the flesh. Their defining characteristic is a palpable sense of unbridled sexuality, one made all the more alluring by its defiance against societal norms. At a time when homosexuality was illegal and full-frontal male nudity was considered “obscene,” simply looking at the male body was an act of liberation, defiance, and pure delight.
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