Photo: David von Becker
In the final footage of the Neue Nationalgalerie’s exhibition “Andy Warhol: Fury and Beauty in Velvet,” the camera follows one of Warhol’s lovers, John Giorno, as he lights a cigarette and reclins in a hammock. As sunlight flickers across his body, the camera moves slowly over his limbs, showing close-ups of his light blonde hair, his nipples, his face.
The film is full of love and lust, and the silence enhances the dreamy, carnal feeling – all the more impactful when you consider that it was made in 1963, when homosexuality was still illegal across the US and explicit male eroticism could be punishable by prison time.
On every wall there were penises bulging out of tight trousers.
“The film depicts moments of striking tenderness in what is at times a very explicit show. And aside from Warhol’s gun-toting “Double Elvis,” there are few iconic silkscreens throughout the exhibition. There are no isolated soup cans or iconic Marilyn. Instead, Warhol is a champion of queerness and a pioneer of bold, uncensored, passionate gay love.”
On every wall, penises protrude from tight trousers, but mostly on display: big, small, dangling, erect and ready to be shoved into vaginal openings. Forty years after their creation, the paintings retain their shockingly deadpan power. The only real surprise is that these X-rated Warhols have always been there, just politely excised from the canon.
The exhibition traces his childhood as a shy, withdrawn boy growing up in Pennsylvania, how he would paint Jean Cocteau-esque portraits of his classmates to ward off bullies, and his rise to become a hugely successful illustrator and world-renowned artist in New York.
Warhol kept his sexual orientation largely secret throughout his career, hiding behind a mask of asexuality, and it wasn’t until the late ’70s, when he grew tired of the attention Robert Mapplethorpe was attracting with his photographs of sadomasochistic male nudes in leather, that he finally let his guard down and began his “Sex Parts” series.
The bold work depicts almost exclusively male genitalia, and takes up an entire central room of the museum, with his signature colours (gold, green and yellow) playingfully mixing sexual irreverence with pornographic imagery.
Somehow, in this moving but somewhat futile pursuit of charm, he reveals his own intense weakness.
Curators Klaus Biesenbach and Lisa Botti have been bold in focusing so heavily on Warhol’s lovers and his obsession with the human body. But as Velvet Rage and Beauty delves deeper into Warhol’s lovers and his penchant for muscular beauty, the exhibition becomes more and more superficial. That doesn’t mean the exhibition is bad or uninteresting — quite the opposite — but it just reveals a certain lack of substance through its tabloid-style entrance.
By the end, there’s a strange emptiness to the posing starlets and repetitive rows of Polaroid photographs — a scenario that perfectly reflects Warhol himself, an artist who was happy to stay on the surface of things and enjoyed a shallow voyeurism of celebrity culture.
There’s a startling video you might miss that shows an aging Warhol posing for a series of photographs, cross-dressed, wearing a blonde porcupine wig, thick red lipstick and pockmarked skin, as he can be heard complaining about the whereabouts of his missing assistants.
Somehow, in this moving but somewhat futile quest for glamour, he also reveals his own intense vulnerability (could his obsessive pursuit of the perfect male face have arisen from a distaste for his own face?) This wayward and contradictory figure is utterly impossible to grasp or understand, and perhaps that is why the exhibition, despite its flaws and dreamy superficiality, is so mesmerizing and seductive.
Andy Warhol: Fury and Beauty in Velvet, until October 6, Neue Nationalgalerie, Mitte, Potsdamer Strasse. 50
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