Andy Warhol

Warhol’s engagement with the nude predates Pop. His drawings of male bodies from the 1950s already reveal an interest in erotic looking, idealized form, and the translation of desire into a highly stylized graphic language. In the 1970s and 1980s, that interest became more explicit through Polaroid-based paintings, large drawings, the Torso series, and the Sex Parts prints of 1978. Across these works, the naked body is treated with the same tension between intimacy and repetition that characterizes Warhol’s better-known images of celebrities and commodities.

Published for Robert Miller Gallery’s 1995 exhibition, Andy Warhol Nudes isolates this material as a coherent body of work rather than treating it as a peripheral aspect of his career. Linda Nochlin’s essay, “Sex Is So Abstract,” places the works within broader questions of sexuality, representation, objectification, and the instability of looking. The catalogue is especially useful because it brings together works from several decades, making visible the continuity between Warhol’s early drawings and his later, more overtly sexual imagery.