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Andy Warhol Retrospective

More on the Warhol Retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Last weekend Daze linked to a New York Times review which criticized the show for downplaying Warhol's gay sensibility and homoerotic art works. Three weeks earlier, Robert Summers made similar criticisms in The Advocate. "But even though I welcome a Warhol retrospective, I must say that both the selection of the artworks (and the calculated omissions) and the scripting of Warhol as an asexual (read: heterosexual) art historical figure disappoint me." Summers may have a valid point about the selection of artworks, but he loses me here:

The retrospective fails to contextualize any of the artwork on display. Quite noticeable is the absence of any explanatory wall text that would aid the general viewer in understanding both the context and significance of the works. It would have been instructive for the exhibition to have explained that many of Warhol's early drawings, especially his homoerotic nude drawings of boys, were first exhibited at the Bodley Gallery in 1956 but were dismissed as "smut" by critics and that they were dropped by the Tanager Gallery because of their blatant homoeroticism — indeed, the reception of these images was Warhol's first experience of art world homophobia.

Ugh, count me with the curators on this one. The modern museum trend of placing long, didactic, jargony explanatory text alongside the artworks annoys the hell out of me. Put the commentary in the exhibition catalog and let the artworks stand by themselves.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is currently running a major career-spanning Andy Warhol Retrospective. But Holland Cotter in the New York Times complains that the show's curators have downplayed Warhol's gay sensibility and sexual subject matter.

Warhol was also the first major postwar artist to put gay identity — or queer identity, to use the term now favored by many gay men and lesbians as an ironic badge of pride — at the very center of his work. This was in the 1950's and early 60's, before Stonewall and gay liberation, when to do so meant to be shunned by many of his artist colleagues, gay and straight. Warhol didn't care, or pretended not to, and just by being himself, a public sissy, he automatically became one of the important political artists of his time.

You might not recognize the queer artist from "Andy Warhol Retrospective," a majestically installed career survey on view this summer at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. [...]

So what's missing? Sex. Not eroticism — everything Warhol did feels erotic — but representations of actual sex, physical sex. Try to imagine a Picasso retrospective without sex. No penises, no breasts, no vaginas. No artist having his way with his studio models, no men and women joyously in flagrante. It's out of the question; sex was too much a part of his work.

It was a main ingredient in Warhol's, too. He did whole series of sexually explicit paintings and took hundreds, probably thousands of explicit photographs. You don't see any of them here. Why? One possibility: the images are almost exclusively of men and male sex parts and express an undisguised interest in same-sex sex.

I have no idea if this criticism is warranted. The MoCA show is hardly unique in slighting Warhol's explicit homoerotic paintings and photographs. I spent an hour browsing Warhol material on the Internet this morning without coming across anything even remotely sexually explicit. But I do love this 1982 photograph by Christopher Makos. (Jul 2002)