Andy Warhol: Velvet Rage and Beauty
“places in one striking volume a variety of homoerotic work from throughout Warhol’s career, some of which was not displayed in his lifetime.”
When Andy Warhol’s homoerotic film My Hustler opened in New York in 1965, screenings were surveilled by plainclothes policemen. Three years later, an Atlanta screening of Lonesome Cowboys, a Warhol production, led to a police raid of the theater. Some credit this event as Atlanta’s Stonewall, the genesis of the city’s LGBTQ movement. While a common image of Warhol is that of the asexual voyeur, a man who wished to feel nothing, Warhol was definitely defying the limits on representations of gay desire in the period. Moreover, he had long-term loving relationships with Jed Johnson and, later, Jon Gould.
The premise of Andy Warhol: Velvet Rage and Beauty, the handsome volume of Warhol’s art celebrating male beauty, is that Warhol’s place as a queer artist has been marginalized by many art historians and art critics as a means of keeping his work “mainstream.” It is certainly true that Warhol became famous in the early 1960s when homosexuality was still illegal in New York City. To be an openly queer artist was to place oneself in a highly specialized niche, and Warhol wanted to be a star.
Nonetheless, as Lisa Botti points out in an introductory essay, Warhol stated in an interview for ARTnews in 1968, “I think that the whole interview on me should be just on homosexuality.” That statement was cut from the published interview, but it does show that Warhol did not want to be a closeted artist.
Yet, as Blake Gopnik points out in an interview included in the volume, “I think he was deeply conflicted about it [his homosexuality]. Maybe less conflicted than some people, but it wasn’t straightforward for him.” Warhol, after all, was born in the 1920s and was a lifelong devout Catholic. In the volume, Jessica Beck rightly notes the tension in Warhol’s work between concealing and flaunting his queerness
Velvet Rage and Beauty contains illustrations of the work included in an exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. What cannot be included, of course are Warhol’s homoerotic films, which were screened in specially constructed theatres during the exhibition.
Images in the volume are arranged chronologically beginning in the 1950s with the early line drawings of men and the striking images from the Gold Book. The section on the 1960s begins with the famous 1963 portrait of Elvis to stills and the famous film posters featuring the stunning Warhol “superstar,” Joe Dallesandro. Images from the 1970s include photographs including those of Mick Jagger and Warhol’s partner, Jed Johnson, as well as the colorful silk screens from Ladies and Gentlemen. There are also photographs and silkscreen and acrylic work from the Torso volume, which is filled with phallic images. Most striking from the 1980s are the Polaroid images of Warhol in various drag personae.
Warhol was always a queer artist. Pop art itself was a movement created by gay men. Warhol’s films align him with other queer artists like Jack Smith. His circle at The Factory included queer theatrical figures like Ronald Tavel. What we have in this volume is the more homoerotic element of Warhol’s queerness, his fascination with male beauty and his penchant for removing the fig leaf and creating celebrations of the phallus.
Preceding the illustrations are a series of conversations between curator-editor Klaus Biesenbach and Warhol experts Wayne Koestenbaum, Blake Gopnik, Donna DeSalvo, and Jessica Beck on the relationship of Warhol’s queerness to his work. There are fascinating insights here, but Biesenbach tends to repeat himself in the interviews. Some editing of himself would have been useful.
Andy Warhol: Velvet Rage and Beauty places in one striking volume a variety of homoerotic work from throughout Warhol’s career, some of which was not displayed in his lifetime.