Throughout his career, Andy Warhol produced several erotic artworks in the form of drawings, polaroids, films, paintings, & screen prints. A follower messaged me awhile back saying they would love a deeper exploration of Warhol’s erotic artworks after watching The Andy Warhol Diaries on Netflix. The show mentions some of these erotic artworks & suggests that they may be some of Warhol’s most personal work, as they show Warhol taking a step back from popular culture themes & documenting something personal to him.
The earliest examples of Warhol’s erotic artwork are his drawings from the 1950s.
In the 1960s, Warhol started making sexually explicit films.
Blow Job (1964) is a silent film showing DeVeren Bookwalter’s face as he’s getting a blow job from an offscreen partner. Blue Movie (1969) was the first adult erotic film depicting explicit sex to receive wide theatrical release in the United States & is still regarded as a seminal film in the Golden Age of Porn. It was released at a time that porn was becoming accepted in the mainstream & some of it was being considered art by critics. In 2016, Blue Movie was screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC.
In the late 1970s, Warhol began on two series of works originating from a collection of erotic polaroids he had taken. While the Torso works focused on classical nude aesthetics & were intended for museum exhibitions, the Sex Parts prints depicted actual sexual activity, blurring the line between art & pornography.
Sex Parts
Sex Parts was made during a turning point in Warhol’s career - by making work about male nudity & sex, galleries & dealers were not as likely to purchase it. In addition, Warhol was making a statement as a gay man at the height of his fame in a culture & time that criminalized homosexuality. He preferred to describe these works as landscapes rather than nudes.
Warhol’s second series was his Torsos paintings. Made from screen prints of his polaroids, Warhol painted the prints with color before printing a black image over the top.
Torsos
Beautiful & personal work by him that is lesser known <3
Warhol was such an explorer, using all kinds of media, I'm glad to rediscover him through your post.
I would never have discovered this interesting work of Andy´s on my own, thanks!