Andy Warhol’s Homosexuality Stars in an Elegant Show in Berlin

“O was an otter / who slept in the same bed with this young man, / and there was never an odder otter.” Above this verse by Ralph Thomas Ward winds a single sinuous line, tracing two male silhouettes united in the prelude to a kiss or a tender tête-à-tête. Andy Warhol’s Two Male Heads Face to Face (1952) found early publication alongside various images of unabashedly same-sex desire, as did lithographs from the artist’s “Studies for a Boy Book,” exhibited at New York’s Bodley Gallery on Valentine’s Day in 1954.

Warhol’s homosexuality—the subject of a wide-ranging and elegant show titled “Warhol: Velvet Rage and Beauty” at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin—proved an open secret for most of his adult life. Gathering over 300 paintings, prints, photographs, collages, films, and drawings, the exhibition (on view through October 6) hammers this home from the offerings in the first room: a series of works on paper, including his celebrated “blotted line” drawings, that feature a range of undressed young men as subjects and objects of an amorous gaze. The continuity of that vision through subsequent decades and diverse media finds confirmation in a monitor playing Blow Job (1964)—a silent cinematic homage to voyeuristic pleasure concentrated in the male face—suspended above the same gallery.

Just across from Two Male Heads hang photographs and a silkscreen painting of Jon Gould, with whom Warhol maintained an undisclosed romance until the former’s death from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1986. Sandwiched between the McCarthyite hunt for “perverts” and the depredations of the AIDS crisis, Warhol’s sexual identity hardly found auspicious circumstances in which to flourish.

Timed to coincide with Berlin’s LGBTQ Pride festivities—a giant rainbow flag ripples from one of the museum’s masts—“Velvet Rage and Beauty” vows to give Warhol the “proud coming-out” he never enjoyed in his lifetime. The artist continues to stand out not for the embodiment of a rousing erotic life but precisely the opposite: an almost magical incarnation of affectlessness and an ability to sink beneath the skin of the most familiar objects and images, including his own mask-like face. Many of the works in the show are far less familiar than his trademark Brillo Boxes or Campbell’s Soup Cans. A good portion of them were never exhibited until after Warhol’s death in 1987. Yet several—from the racy cover of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers to the image of Joe Dallesandro’s shirtless torso (from Warhol’s film Flesh) on the Smiths’ eponymous debut album—emerge here from a long public closeting to find new queer and contemporary inflections.

Exhibition view of “Andy Warhol: Velvet Rage and Beauty“ at Neue Nationalgalerie.

It is the tension between the love of male beauty and its compulsory occlusion that the exhibition aims to stage, borrowing half its title from Alan Downs’s book The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World (2005). That volume explores the pain of growing up gay in a straight world, and the strategies developed to elude its attendant shame: impulsive distractions from an inauthentically experienced existence, compulsive “decorations” of one’s life with professional success and its material masks. As the American artist Glenn Ligon notes in Netflix’s 2022 documentary series The Andy Warhol Diaries, Warhol embodied “the right kind of gay … a nice artist, acceptable.” That palatable queerness formed a piece with his redacted family name—a “Warhola” shorn of the more “ethnic” redolence of its final vowel.

The mix of shame and respectability sheds light on Warhol’s gradual shift from ringleader of the Factory’s social and sexual misfits to portraitist of the “glitterati,” his turn away from transgender Superstars like Candy Darling to society VIPs. Do the exhibition’s shots of the fastidiously preppy and discreet Jed Johnson—Warhol’s partner for 12 years with whom he shared a home on East 66th Street—form the obverse to the pornographic Sex Parts (1978) screenprints and silkscreens from the same years? To what extent must we read the artist’s sexual life into his more privately conceived images?

If the Sex Parts proved too scandalous to circulate beyond a few buyers abroad, the more classically inspired Torsos (1977) found collectors and, eventually, museum canonization. Warhol occasionally turned to the museum itself as a repository of homoerotic desire, as in his photographs of marble wrestlers in the Louvre’s Greek sculpture collection from 1982—sparingly installed here on the Neue Nationalgalerie’s green marble supports (and how different Warhol’s retrospective appeared in the same space in 1969, with multiple Electric Chairs hung on the same surface). The preparatory photographs for both the Torso and Sex Parts series underscores the ambivalence between flesh and form, refined classicism and erect cocks. The exhibition continually plays upon vacillations between intimacy and exposure, with one of the Torso prints of black and white buttocks enlarged and sprawling down the length of one gallery.

Less immediately visible (and fittingly so) are the numerous photographs of Warhol in drag which line the exhibition dividers’ outer walls. Snapped for his own eyes in the early 1980s, most reveal muted brown tones except for the shock of red lipstick. For all the variety of wigs, poses, and clothes, Warhol appears tightlipped and reserved, almost wary. These contrast notably with his 1975 Ladies & Gentlemen series, based on photos of Black and Latinx drag queens and transgender women. First exhibited in Italy, these paintings and prints match the exuberance of their sitters with kaleidoscopic colors; their transfers appear enlivened by Warhol’s generous brush or swaths of garish collage. Each subject is identified here by name (Alphanso Panell, Marsha P. Johnson, etc.) as participants in a “commemoration of New York’s vibrant drag and trans community.”

Exhibition view of “Andy Warhol: Velvet Rage and Beauty“ at Neue Nationalgalerie.

Yet despite payments of $50 at the time, not one of these individuals received credit or a caption. They served instead as anonymous screens for droll (white) projections about race, gender, and sexuality. If we can approach these works today with new critical questions, it serves no one to paper over the power dynamics entailed in their making. Some similar dynamics inform the images of Jean-Michel Basquiat with which the exhibition concludes. Warhol’s overdetermined relationship to the younger artist—as friend, mentor, admirer, competitor—nevertheless proved distinct from the Ladies & Gentlemen works and is well trammeled in scholarship. The pairing of the double portrait of Portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat as David (1984) with a Double Elvis (1963) reveals, in any case, an evolution in Warhol’s representations. If he could revere the famed singer’s eroticism only obliquely, Basquiat’s jockstrap-clad body and direct gaze conjure up a more straightforward sense of desire, one that hints at the sitter’s partial complicity.

The exhibition lays claim to the body as the superintending conceit of Warhol’s corpus—an argument often strained by inclusions here of the Hammer & Sickle (1976) works or allusions to the film Sleep (1964). Sometimes a tower really is just a tower. Conversely, many of the bodies on display appear sapped of erotic charge by virtue of their hanging. The raw pleasures of the flesh cede to the propriety of form with almost antiseptic elegance. Lacking any consistently chronological order, furthermore, disparate series and themes—and their significance—fail at times to cohere into anything other than disconnected articulations of “beauty.” Any sense of rage feels remote. To be sure, it is precisely such sublimations—of shame into the façade of unquestioned success—that so many queer artists of Warhol’s generation were obliged to master. The very slickness of the beauty often attests to the messiness of those original indignities.