Andy Warhol Nudes
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Andy Warhol Nudes Details
About the Author Linda Nochlin is a leading art historian and the author of several books, including The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity, The Politics of Vision: Essays on 19th Century Art and Society, Women, Art and Power, and Realism (Penguin). Read more
Reviews
I bought this book as a political act, if an attempt to relate on a personal level can be considered political. I was living in Minneapolis at the time and went to a major chain bookstore in the city of Saint Paul to order it, in a reversal of my usual (new wave vs. old hat) stereotypes of those two cities. If anyone considers the cover too shocking to reveal to internet shoppers, be glad that the back cover is not what is shown. Most of the book is about male sexual objects, and the back cover has male thighs forming a V with no attempt to hide what Rilke called "manhood's crest" in a famous poem about an archaic torso of Apollo. (The poem appears in 20 German Poets, translated by Walter Kaufmann, p. 221.) Plate 33 in Andy's "Paintings of the 1970s" has six repetitions of what appears to me to be the display of a fist as a sexual object, given its proximity to what is typical in this book. What helped me most to gain my appreciation for the contents of this book was the text at the beginning, which begins with a direct Andy Warhol quotation, "Sex is So Abstract." Some of the information in the text is extracted from a book by Bob Colacello called "Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close-Up." On the actual quality of the artwork, the text says, "His secret is his profound and enduring aestheticism, . . . burning with a hard, gemlike flame, but veiling this taste in a cool, laconic front of Coke bottles, soup cans," and the bodies in this book. The final page of text before the drawings explains Warhol's use of fingerpainting on Polaroid photographs, which appear to me on Plates 44, 45, and 46 to be the artist's way of searching for erogenous zones. On a political level, Jane Fonda must have thought that F.T.A. shows would be entertaining, as well as conveying a particular message about militaristic thinking. Whoever thought of calling those shows "F.T.A." must have realized that the best communication involves some form of ecstatic flow, which gives people something somewhere between what people are used to and what they would really desire. Art stands up under this kind of scrutiny, while politics might mean getting involved with the kind of people who would like to treat it as unmentionable. This book seems to be about art, but writing helpful reviews may involve a lot more politics than shoppers would want to know. Don't let me tell you where this book doesn't belong.