.As the Gay Liberation Movement got into full swing during the 1970s, Andy Warhol began to focus on the LGBTQ community in his art, creating two seminal bodies of work, Sex Parts and Torsos and Ladies & Gentlemen, selections of which are now on view online in Andy Warhol Polaroids at Fotografiska New York.
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The Sex Parts and Torsos series began when a man boasted to Warhol of his tremendous appendage, which he allowed the artist to photograph. Warhol placed it in a box labelled “Sex Parts”. In 1977, he returned to the series with renewed gusto, using a 35mm camera and a Polaroid Big Shot to make tightly framed shots of torsos, buttocks, and penises of men recruited from gay bathhouses by Halston’s boyfriend, artist Victor Bockris.
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The works were made less than a decade after the US Supreme Court decriminalised the possession of “obscene” materials in 1969, yet photographs of male nudes were still the provenance of pornographers. “Warhol’s sexuality was known within some circles, but it was something he kept private in many ways,” says Amanda Hajjar, Director of Exhibitions. “This work is significant in telling us about Warhol as a person, an artist, and that the queer community was still very much underground.”
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