In the final film of the exhibition Andy Warhol: Velvet Rage and Beauty at Neue Nationalgalerie, a camera traces the body of John Giorno, one of Warhol’s lovers, as he lights a cigarette and lies back in a hammock. With the sun flickering across his body, the camera slowly moves over his limbs, taking in the light-blond hair on his legs, a nipple, closeups of his face.
It is a film saturated in love and desire, its soundlessness heightening the sense of dreamy carnality. The work is even more impactful when you consider that back in 1963, the year it was produced, homosexuality was still illegal across the US and such blatant male-on-male eroticism could be punished with imprisonment.
On every wall, penises bulge out of tight trousers.
The film is a standout moment of tenderness in what is at times an exceptionally explicit show. And apart from Warhol’s gun-toting ‘Double Elvis’, there’s barely an iconic silkscreen in the entire exhibition. No detached soup cans or iconic Marilyns – instead, we have Warhol as a champion of queerness, a daring, uncensored and lusty pioneer of gay love.
On every wall, penises bulge out of tight trousers, but mostly they’re exposed; big ones, small ones, some hanging down, others erect and ready to be stuffed into orifices. Forty years after they were made, these images still have a shocking deadpan potency. The only real surprise is that this X-rated Warhol has been there all along, it’s just been politely excised from the canon.
The exhibition takes you through his early years as a shy, withdrawn boy in Pennsylvania, making Jean Cocteau-like portraits of schoolmates to stop them picking on him. Then through his transition from a highly successful New York illustrator to a world-famous artist.
Throughout his career, Warhol’s sexuality was largely kept a secret, with the artist hiding behind a mask of asexuality. It wasn’t until the late 70s – annoyed by the attention Robert Mapplethorpe was getting with his nude photographs of sado-masochistic, leather-clad men – that Warhol threw caution aside and began his Sex Parts series.
This full-on romp features almost exclusively male genitalia. The entire central room of the museum is devoted to the series, his signature patches of colour (gold, greens and yellows) overlaying the pornographic images in a jaunty mélange of sexual gratuity.
Somehow within this touching though somewhat futile quest for glamour, he reveals his intense vulnerability.
The curators, Director Klaus Biesenbach and Lisa Botti, have been bold to focus so closely on Warhol’s intimates and his obsessive engagement with the human body. But as Velvet Rage and Beauty delves further into Warhol’s lovers and his proclivities for hunkish beauty, the exhibition becomes increasingly superficial, which is not to say it is badly done or uninteresting – quite the opposite. It’s just that its tabloid-style entry point reveals a certain lack of substance.
By the end, an odd vacuity lingers across its repeating rows of posing starlets and polaroids – a scenario perfectly reflecting Warhol himself, an artist who was so delighted to be on the surface of things, revelling in the shallow voyeurism of celebrity culture.
There’s an extraordinary video that could so easily be missed, showing an ageing Warhol posing for a series of photographs. Dressed in drag, with his blond porcupine-like wig, thick red lipstick and pitted skin, we hear him grumbling about the whereabouts of various missing assistants.
Somehow within this touching though somewhat futile quest for glamour, he reveals his intense vulnerability, too. (Might his obsessive pursuit for the perfect male face have stemmed from a dislike of his own?) Not that it is at all possible to grasp or understand this mercurial, contradictory figure – which is probably why this exhibition, despite its flaws and dreamy superficiality, is so captivating and seductive.
- Andy Warhol: Velvet Rage and Beauty, through Oct 6, Neue Nationalgalerie, Mitte, Potsdamer Str. 50
