Sex Parts was a final announcement or affirmation of his homosexuality.Īndy Warhol, Sex Parts and Torsos at Hedges Projects As Warhol’s longtime assistant Ronnie Cutrone recalls, the artist was a Catholic and a homosexual who jokingly referred to homosexuality as a “problem”.
Andy warhol gay sex art series#
However, it seems that the underlying motive for the entire series was the final acceptance of his sexuality. For the artist, these images playfully occupy the space between the high and the low by challenging the notional values we assign to different cultural artifacts. Undoubtedly the tamer part of the series and less graphic, Torsos features screenprints of bodies posed and presented in ways that more easily evoke the traditional classical nude.
When asked by the writer and Factory-insider, Bob Colacello about the explicit content of the series, Warhol replied: By highlighting the body through extreme close-ups and cropping, Warhol allows no usual pictorial connection with the model. The body of work, that Andy Warhol fondly referred to as the Cocks, Cunts and Assholes series, is based on a series of Polaroid shots created during several photo shoots with models procured from gay bathhouses and clubs by Warhol’s assistant, Victor Hugo.Ī collection of anonymous male and female body parts captured with 35mm camera and Polaroid Big Shot, Sex Parts was a radical compositional departure and along with Torsos, his most focused figurative series. Left and Right: Andy Warhol - Torsos and Sex Parts, 1977 He revisited the contents of the box in Autumn of 1977 and decided to create a series of works based on the original images he found inside.Ī collection of these provocative Polaroids is currently on view at Hedges Projects. Warhol responded by taking out his camera, and these photographs were placed in a box casually labeled Sex Parts. The seed of these two series sprouted sometime earlier, when a man approached Warhol boasting about the size of his penis. Belonging to the darker and more profound aspects of his output, these works blurred the line between art and pornography. Isolated from series like Marilyn, Campbell’s and other highly accessible works, these two bodies of work are regarded as the artist’s most personal ones.
But given how eagerly this exhibition wants to change the conversation about Warhol, it seems odd to limit the nonpaying public to his most transactional and perhaps cynical work.In the fall of 1977, Andy Warhol began work on two new series of artworks which would become known as Torsos and Sex Parts. He called them “business art,” and the money he earned from them helped subsidize some of his less lucrative ventures. Gorman, painter of sentimental Native American scenes), underscores the pragmatic role they played in Warhol’s business model. They are hung salon style, floor to ceiling, and the number of them, as well as the wildly eclectic variety of their subjects (including the shah of Iran and R.C. And the museum has devoted one gallery on the ground floor, which is accessible to the public without paying the $25 admission, to Warhol’s portraits. This seems a concession to the same homophobia that made Warhol circulate these images privately. A series of sexually explicit images - a 1979 portfolio titled “Sex Parts” - is discreetly placed on the side of a large wall panel and easily missed. A couple of curatorial decisions at the Whitney tend to reinforce reflexive thinking about Warhol.