Andy Warhol

Before Andy Warhol’s rise as a defining figure of Pop Art, he created intimate drawings celebrating male beauty and desire. Andy Warhol Love, Sex, & Desire: Drawings 1950–1962 brings together more than 300 works, primarily ink on paper, depicting young men—often nude, seductive and playfully adorned with hearts and other embellishments.

Created while Warhol was establishing himself as a successful commercial illustrator, the drawings reveal a more personal side of the artist. He exhibited works from the series at New York’s Bodley Gallery in 1956, but the prevailing homophobia of the period prevented the project from receiving the recognition he had hoped for.

Selected by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the book features an introduction by Michael Dayton Hermann, essays by Blake Gopnik and Drew Zeiba, and poetry by James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Harold Norse, Essex Hemphill and Allen Ginsberg.

Elegant, erotic and humorous, the drawings anticipate the fascination with desire, beauty, voyeurism and detachment that would come to define Warhol’s work.

Hardback 416 pages