.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Be a Somebody with a Body (1985) is a magnificent example of the vivid dialogue with advertising culture that lay at the heart of Andy Warhol’s practice. Rendered in jet black polymer paint on a gold canvas half a metre across—a rare colour and large scale among Warhol’s versions of this image—is a bodybuilder, arms crossed over his chest as he looks up at the slogan ‘Be a Somebody with a Body’. Confident and heroic, he flashes us a proud smile, his contoured, athletic physique a testament to his remarkable strength. Surrounding his head, a dazzling halo appears, a device which lends the figure a Christ-like presence, highlighting his power and masculinity. The boldface text, which capitalises, underlines and enlarges the word ‘Body’, emphasises the declarative language of modern advertising, stressing its promotion of accessible yet elusive goals. While it borrows its imagery from a bodybuilding ad, the figure—often likened to action superstar Sylvester Stallone, whom Warhol photographed during the 1980s—can also be considered as a stand-in for the artist himself, referencing the obsessive daily exercise he was completing with his personal trainer at the time. Warhol’s romanticised rendering of his subject presents us with a whimsical ideal, a physical embodiment of aspiration and desire. ‘[Warhol’s] connection to Pop art starts with the body’, Jessica Beck has said of this work. ‘With the bodybuilder, there’s a trying on of masculinity or a performing masculinity that comes out. It’s an extreme exaggeration of an ideal’ (J. Beck, quoted in Cristina Rouvalis, ‘My Perfect, Imperfect Body’, Carnegie Magazine, Fall 2016).
Executed in 1985, Be a Somebody with a Body belongs to a series of late silkscreen paintings that Warhol created in the final years of his life, in which he re-visited the advertising imagery and black-and-white palette of his earliest Pop canvases of the ’60s. The roughhewn edges, loosely rendered imagery, and unpolished aesthetic of the present silkscreen recalls the hand-painted canvases he produced at the start of his career, such as his seminal Coca Cola [2] (1961). Through its emphasis on the modern phenomenon of the bodybuilder, a figure popularised through magazines such as Muscle Training, the work also foregrounds Warhol’s longstanding and complex fascination with the human body. Beginning with his depiction of a plastic surgery patient in Before and After (1961), a work which recalls his experience having his own nose re-shaped at the age of 29, Warhol used his practice as a means of communicating anxieties about his body image. ‘If you want to know about Andy Warhol, then just look at the surface of my pictures, and there I am; there’s nothing in between’ the artist famously stated in 1967 (A. Warhol, quoted by G. Berg, ‘Andy: My True Story’, Los Angeles Free Press, 17 March 1967, p. 3). In Be a Somebody with a Body, Warhol’s insecurities manifest most poignantly in the exaggerated ideal of the bodybuilder, his hulky torso inviting the promise of transformation. ‘He created the persona out of his anxieties’, James Boaden has said of Warhol. ‘He wore a wig, dressed in leather jackets, and disguised the body in ways that helped him reinvent himself’ (J. Boaden, quoted in Cristina Rouvalis, ‘My Perfect, Imperfect Body’, Carnegie Magazine, Fall 2016).
Executed in 1985, Be a Somebody with a Body belongs to a series of late silkscreen paintings that Warhol created in the final years of his life, in which he re-visited the advertising imagery and black-and-white palette of his earliest Pop canvases of the ’60s. The roughhewn edges, loosely rendered imagery, and unpolished aesthetic of the present silkscreen recalls the hand-painted canvases he produced at the start of his career, such as his seminal Coca Cola [2] (1961). Through its emphasis on the modern phenomenon of the bodybuilder, a figure popularised through magazines such as Muscle Training, the work also foregrounds Warhol’s longstanding and complex fascination with the human body. Beginning with his depiction of a plastic surgery patient in Before and After (1961), a work which recalls his experience having his own nose re-shaped at the age of 29, Warhol used his practice as a means of communicating anxieties about his body image. ‘If you want to know about Andy Warhol, then just look at the surface of my pictures, and there I am; there’s nothing in between’ the artist famously stated in 1967 (A. Warhol, quoted by G. Berg, ‘Andy: My True Story’, Los Angeles Free Press, 17 March 1967, p. 3). In Be a Somebody with a Body, Warhol’s insecurities manifest most poignantly in the exaggerated ideal of the bodybuilder, his hulky torso inviting the promise of transformation. ‘He created the persona out of his anxieties’, James Boaden has said of Warhol. ‘He wore a wig, dressed in leather jackets, and disguised the body in ways that helped him reinvent himself’ (J. Boaden, quoted in Cristina Rouvalis, ‘My Perfect, Imperfect Body’, Carnegie Magazine, Fall 2016).