Andy Warhol’s Homosexuality Stars in an Elegant Present in Berlin

“O was an otter / who slept in the identical mattress with this younger man, / and there was by no means an odder otter.” Above this verse by Ralph Thomas Ward winds a single sinuous line, tracing two male silhouettes united within the prelude to a kiss or a young tête-à-tête. Andy Warhol’s Two Male Heads Face to Face (1952) discovered early publication alongside varied photos of unabashedly same-sex need, as did lithographs from the artist’s “Research for a Boy E-book,” exhibited at New York’s Bodley Gallery on Valentine’s Day in 1954.

Warhol’s homosexuality—the topic of a wide-ranging and stylish present titled “Warhol: Velvet Rage and Magnificence” at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin—proved an open secret for many of his grownup life. Gathering over 300 work, prints, images, collages, movies, and drawings, the exhibition (on view via October 6) hammers this dwelling from the choices within the first room: a sequence of works on paper, together with his celebrated “blotted line” drawings, that function a variety of undressed younger males as topics and objects of an amorous gaze. The continuity of that imaginative and prescient via subsequent a long time and various media finds affirmation in a monitor enjoying Blow Job (1964)—a silent cinematic homage to voyeuristic pleasure concentrated within the male face—suspended above the identical gallery.

Simply throughout from Two Male Heads cling images and a silkscreen portray of Jon Gould, with whom Warhol maintained an undisclosed romance till the previous’s loss of life from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1986. Sandwiched between the McCarthyite hunt for “perverts” and the depredations of the AIDS disaster, Warhol’s sexual identification hardly discovered auspicious circumstances through which to flourish.

Timed to coincide with Berlin’s LGBTQ Delight festivities—a large rainbow flag ripples from one of many museum’s masts—“Velvet Rage and Magnificence” vows to present Warhol the “proud coming-out” he by no means loved in his lifetime. The artist continues to face out not for the embodiment of a rousing erotic life however exactly the other: an virtually magical incarnation of affectlessness and a capability to sink beneath the pores and skin of essentially the most acquainted objects and pictures, together with his personal mask-like face. Most of the works within the present are far much less acquainted than his trademark Brillo Packing containers or Campbell’s Soup Cans. An excellent portion of them have been by no means exhibited till after Warhol’s loss of life in 1987. But a number of—from the racy cowl of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers to the picture of Joe Dallesandro’s shirtless torso (from Warhol’s movie Flesh) on the Smiths’ eponymous debut album—emerge right here from an extended public closeting to search out new queer and up to date inflections.

It’s the stress between the love of male magnificence and its obligatory occlusion that the exhibition goals to stage, borrowing half its title from Alan Downs’s e book The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Ache of Rising Up Homosexual in a Straight Man’s World (2005). That quantity explores the ache of rising up homosexual in a straight world, and the methods developed to elude its attendant disgrace: impulsive distractions from an inauthentically skilled existence, compulsive “decorations” of 1’s life with skilled success and its materials masks. Because the American artist Glenn Ligon notes in Netflix’s 2022 documentary sequence The Andy Warhol Diaries, Warhol embodied “the proper sort of homosexual … a pleasant artist, acceptable.” That palatable queerness fashioned a chunk along with his redacted household title—a “Warhola” shorn of the extra “ethnic” redolence of its closing vowel.

The combination of disgrace and respectability sheds gentle on Warhol’s gradual shift from ringleader of the Manufacturing unit’s social and sexual misfits to portraitist of the “glitterati,” his flip away from transgender Superstars like Sweet Darling to society VIPs. Do the exhibition’s pictures of the fastidiously preppy and discreet Jed Johnson—Warhol’s accomplice for 12 years with whom he shared a house on East 66th Road—kind the obverse to the pornographic Intercourse Components (1978) screenprints and silkscreens from the identical years? To what extent should we learn the artist’s sexual life into his extra privately conceived photos?

If the Intercourse Components proved too scandalous to flow into past a number of consumers overseas, the extra classically impressed Torsos (1977) discovered collectors and, ultimately, museum canonization. Warhol often turned to the museum itself as a repository of homoerotic need, as in his images of marble wrestlers within the Louvre’s Greek sculpture assortment from 1982—sparingly put in right here on the Neue Nationalgalerie’s inexperienced marble helps (and the way totally different Warhol’s retrospective appeared in the identical area in 1969, with a number of Electrical Chairs held on the identical floor). The preparatory images for each the Torso and Intercourse Components sequence underscores the ambivalence between flesh and kind, refined classicism and erect cocks. The exhibition frequently performs upon vacillations between intimacy and publicity, with one of many Torso prints of black and white buttocks enlarged and sprawling down the size of 1 gallery.

Much less instantly seen (and fittingly so) are the quite a few images of Warhol in drag which line the exhibition dividers’ outer partitions. Snapped for his personal eyes within the early Eighties, most reveal muted brown tones apart from the shock of pink lipstick. For all of the number of wigs, poses, and garments, Warhol seems tightlipped and reserved, virtually cautious. These distinction notably along with his 1975 Women & Gents sequence, primarily based on pictures of Black and Latinx drag queens and transgender ladies. First exhibited in Italy, these work and prints match the exuberance of their sitters with kaleidoscopic colours; their transfers seem enlivened by Warhol’s beneficiant brush or swaths of garish collage. Every topic is recognized right here by title (Alphanso Panell, Marsha P. Johnson, and so forth.) as individuals in a “commemoration of New York’s vibrant drag and trans group.”

But regardless of funds of $50 on the time, not certainly one of these people obtained credit score or a caption. They served as an alternative as nameless screens for droll (white) projections about race, gender, and sexuality. If we will method these works immediately with new important questions, it serves nobody to paper over the facility dynamics entailed of their making. Some related dynamics inform the photographs of Jean-Michel Basquiat with which the exhibition concludes. Warhol’s overdetermined relationship to the youthful artist—as good friend, mentor, admirer, competitor—nonetheless proved distinct from the Women & Gents works and is nicely trammeled in scholarship. The pairing of the double portrait of Portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat as David (1984) with a Double Elvis (1963) reveals, in any case, an evolution in Warhol’s representations. If he might revere the famed singer’s eroticism solely obliquely, Basquiat’s jockstrap-clad physique and direct gaze conjure up a extra easy sense of need, one which hints on the sitter’s partial complicity.

The exhibition lays declare to the physique because the superintending conceit of Warhol’s corpus—an argument usually strained by inclusions right here of the Hammer & Sickle (1976) works or allusions to the movie Sleep (1964). Typically a tower actually is only a tower. Conversely, most of the our bodies on show seem sapped of erotic cost by advantage of their hanging. The uncooked pleasures of the flesh cede to the propriety of kind with virtually antiseptic magnificence. Missing any persistently chronological order, moreover, disparate sequence and themes—and their significance—fail at occasions to cohere into something apart from disconnected articulations of “magnificence.” Any sense of rage feels distant. To make certain, it’s exactly such sublimations—of disgrace into the façade of unquestioned success—that so many queer artists of Warhol’s technology have been obliged to grasp. The very slickness of the sweetness usually attests to the messiness of these authentic indignities.