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Well before Andy Warhol's rise to the pinnacle of Pop Art, he
created and exhibited seductive drawings celebrating male beauty.
Andy Warhol Love, Sex, & Desire: Drawings 1950-1962 features
over three hundred drawings rendered primarily in ink on paper
portraying young men, many of them nude, some sexually charged, and
occasionally adorned with whimsical black hearts and delightful
embellishments. They lounge or preen, proud of or even bored by
their beauty, while the artist sketches them, rapt. They rarely
engage with their keen observer, and likewise Warhol's focus is on
their form, their erotic qualities, and unbridled sexuality. If his
subjects are content to revel in their attractiveness, so too is
Warhol. His confident hand illustrates a multitude of colorful
characters, yet 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 of breaking into the New York art scene,
underestimating the pervading homophobia of the time. While he
never saw through his plan to publish the drawings as a monograph,
he did produce more than a thousand elegant, seemingly effortless
drawings from life. This volume finally brings his project to
fruition by gathering his most striking images, published here for
the first time in a comprehensive book and chosen by the Andy
Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Edited and featuring 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 create moments of introspection, which
expand on the themes and moods present in the drawings. In style,
the drawings evoke the sketches of Jean Cocteau and even Matisse:
highly distilled and sure of line, yet loose. The sly voyeurism,
meanwhile, is entirely Warhol's own, and even the most risque
drawings contain a kind of droll humor-a sense of ironic
detachment-that would become a Warhol trademark. His confident hand
illustrates a multitude of colorful characters, yet also reveals
much about this enigmatic artist.
Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat's complex relationship
captivated the art world then and now. At a time when Warhol was
already world famous and the elder statesman of New York cool,
Basquiat was a downtown talent rising rapidly from the graffiti
scene. Together, they forged an electrifying personal and
professional partnership. As a prolific documentarian of his own
world, Warhol extensively photographed and wrote of his friendship
with Basquiat, all played against the backdrop of 1980s downtown
New York City. It reveals not only the emotional depth of their
relationship but also its ambiguities, extremities, and
complexities. Produced in collaboration with The Andy Warhol
Foundation and Jean-Michel Basquiat's estate, this book chronicles
the duo's relationship in hundreds of previously unpublished
photographs of Basquiat along with a dynamic cast of characters
from Madonna to Grace Jones, Keith Haring to Fela Kuti. The shots
are accompanied by entries from the legendary Andy Warhol Diaries,
selected collaborative artworks, and extensive ephemera. Touching,
intimate, and occasionally sardonic, Warhol on Basquiat is a
voyeuristic glimpse into the lives of two of modern art's brightest
stars.
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