Provenance: The Estate of Andy Warhol and

thence , the Andy Warhol Foundation for the

Visual Arts. Acquired from them directly.

Note: Long before his rise to the pinnacle of

pop art, Andy Warhol created a series of

seductive drawings celebrating male beauty.

The book “Andy Warhol Love, Sex & Desire:

Drawings 1950-1962” (a copy of which is

provided gratis to the buyer of this piece)

contains over 300 of these works, mostly

done in ink on paper. The sheets show young

men, some naked, some in sexually charged

poses, others adorned with teasing black

hearts. They hang around, flirtatiously

flaunting their flawless bodies, or seem bored

in the most attractive way. They rarely look in

the direction of the attentive viewer, who

concentrates entirely on their body shapes,

erotic qualities and unforced sexuality. Warhol was already a successful advertising illustrator when he

exhibited studies from this body of work in 1956 at New York's Bodley Gallery on the Upper East Side. The

drawings should pave his way into the New York art scene, but he underestimated the prevailing

homophobia at the time. Although he made more than a thousand of these elegant, seemingly effortless

nude drawings, his original desire to publish them in a monograph was never completed. The volume is

catching up on the project posthumously. In collaboration with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual

Arts, the most beautiful and striking images have been selected and published here for the very first time.

Edited and with an introduction by Michael Dayton Hermann of the Warhol Foundation, the volume includes

essays by Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik and art critic Drew Zeiba. Plus poetry by James Baldwin , Thom

Gunn, Harold Norse, Essex Hemphill and Allen Ginsberg, creating moments of introspection and perfectly

complementing the themes and moods depicted in the drawings. Stylistically, the drawings are reminiscent of

the sketches by Jean Cocteau and even Matisse: highly condensed and very sure of the lines, yet with a

stimulating freedom and looseness. This cunning voyeurism - even the most daring drawings contain a kind

of whimsical humour and sense of wry detachment - would soon become a trademark of Warhol. His

confident hand illustrates a variety of colourful characters, but also reveals much about this enigmatic artist

himself.