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Lot Essay
Offered from the prestigious collection of Thomas and Doris Ammann, Golden Nude (1957) is a rare and elegant early work by Andy Warhol. Drawn in black ink on glittering gold leaf, it depicts a rear, waist-down view of a male nude, with hands crossed behind his back. Warhol’s distinctive curlicued signature—in fact written by his mother, Julia, as was common in his drawings of the time—appears prominently to the lower left. The work exhibits the deft, lyrical line with which Warhol made his name as a commercial illustrator in the 1950s, while also exploring more avant-garde projects. With its homoerotic theme and echoes of gleaming religious icons, it foreshadows the glamour and idol-worship of his emergent Pop practice, as well as later, more explicit nude series such as the Sex Parts and Torsos of the late 1970s. Golden Nude was included in Warhol’s landmark posthumous retrospective which opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1989.
With a degree in pictorial design from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute, the twenty-year old Warhol arrived in New York from Philadelphia in 1949. He soon found success in the big city. His clients included Vogue, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, and the shoe company I. Miller & Sons. His illustrations were defined by a light, playful sensibility and a camp sense of humour. His mother often contributed her stylised handwriting, most often in the form of the signature. Warhol employed a distinctive blotted-ink line, which he would apply on tracing paper over a sketch before pressing another surface onto the wet ink. This simple transfer technique allowed him to reproduce and vary his designs. There is a sketch on paper of the present work’s subject in the opposite orientation, indicating that the method was used here. Warhol created a lithograph version of this same drawing, printed on gold paper, as part of his limited-edition artist’s book A Gold Book, which he sent to friends and prospective clients in Christmas 1957. The volume was dedicated to ‘Boys / filles / fruits / and flowers / Shoes / and tc and e.w.’ The initials referred to Warhol’s friends Ted Carey and Edward Wallowitch, a prominent photographer: a number of the drawings, possibly including the present work, were based on Wallowitch’s photographs.
By 1956 Warhol had become one of the best-paid commercial artists working in New York, and he was able to go on a round-the-world trip with his friend Charles Lisanby that summer. Their itinerary included two stints in Bangkok, where, according to Lisanby, they saw examples of gilded and lacquered furniture that inspired Warhol’s turn to golden pictures later that year. Warhol in fact used a type of brass leaf known as ‘Dutch metal’, which he laid down on paper to create the ground for works like Golden Nude. Much like the sparkling ground glass he would later use for his 1980s Diamond Dust Shoes, the material offered an appealing blend of opulence and kitsch.
Warhol showed his first gold-leaf works at the Bodley Gallery in December 1956 in Andy Warhol: The Golden Slipper Show or Shoes Shoe in America, an exhibition whose theme related closely to his popular, whimsical shoe advertisements. It was his second solo exhibition at the gallery: earlier that year he had presented Studies for a Boy Book, showing a series of sketchbook portraits of young men and eroticised male nudes. Such openly queer subject matter was daring at a time when homosexuality was criminalised and repressed, particularly during the conservative McCarthy era. The proto-Pop artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, both gay themselves, derided Warhol as ‘too swish’; in 1959 a number of Warhol’s other ‘boy drawings’ would be rejected as inappropriate by the fashionable Tanager Gallery. Warhol was nonetheless successful in balancing his commercial work with his more risqué ventures at the Bodley, laying the foundations for the radical, subversive Pop practice that would change the world in the 1960s.
Warhol’s third exhibition at the Bodley Gallery, A Show of Golden Pictures by Andy Warhol, opened in December 1957, including many of the drawings reproduced in A Gold Book and coinciding with its release. Blake Gopnik observes that ‘unlike his gilded shoes, the subjects of Warhol’s A Gold Book now had a sobriety and lyrical bent that were meant to flag their more serious artistic ambitions’ (B. Gopnik, Warhol: A Life as Art, New York 2020, p. 168). The present work’s image was the only male nude to be included in the book. It bears comparison to the delicate drawings of Henri Matisse and Jean Cocteau: Warhol was known to particularly admire the latter’s 1924 volume of Dessins. For all its economy, however, Golden Nude’s nod to the language of gilded icons—Warhol had been raised a Byzantine Catholic, and would go on to invoke devotional imagery across his practice—implies a provocative play with the sacred and profane. The picture also captures a moment of unguarded intimacy, providing an insight into an artist whose façade was never quite as blank as it seemed. ‘If you want to know about Andy Warhol,’ he would claim a decade later, ‘then just look at the surface of my pictures, and there I am; there’s nothing in between’ (A. Warhol, quoted by G. Berg, ‘Andy: My True Story’, Los Angeles Free Press, 17 March 1967, p. 3).
With a degree in pictorial design from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute, the twenty-year old Warhol arrived in New York from Philadelphia in 1949. He soon found success in the big city. His clients included Vogue, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, and the shoe company I. Miller & Sons. His illustrations were defined by a light, playful sensibility and a camp sense of humour. His mother often contributed her stylised handwriting, most often in the form of the signature. Warhol employed a distinctive blotted-ink line, which he would apply on tracing paper over a sketch before pressing another surface onto the wet ink. This simple transfer technique allowed him to reproduce and vary his designs. There is a sketch on paper of the present work’s subject in the opposite orientation, indicating that the method was used here. Warhol created a lithograph version of this same drawing, printed on gold paper, as part of his limited-edition artist’s book A Gold Book, which he sent to friends and prospective clients in Christmas 1957. The volume was dedicated to ‘Boys / filles / fruits / and flowers / Shoes / and tc and e.w.’ The initials referred to Warhol’s friends Ted Carey and Edward Wallowitch, a prominent photographer: a number of the drawings, possibly including the present work, were based on Wallowitch’s photographs.
By 1956 Warhol had become one of the best-paid commercial artists working in New York, and he was able to go on a round-the-world trip with his friend Charles Lisanby that summer. Their itinerary included two stints in Bangkok, where, according to Lisanby, they saw examples of gilded and lacquered furniture that inspired Warhol’s turn to golden pictures later that year. Warhol in fact used a type of brass leaf known as ‘Dutch metal’, which he laid down on paper to create the ground for works like Golden Nude. Much like the sparkling ground glass he would later use for his 1980s Diamond Dust Shoes, the material offered an appealing blend of opulence and kitsch.
Warhol showed his first gold-leaf works at the Bodley Gallery in December 1956 in Andy Warhol: The Golden Slipper Show or Shoes Shoe in America, an exhibition whose theme related closely to his popular, whimsical shoe advertisements. It was his second solo exhibition at the gallery: earlier that year he had presented Studies for a Boy Book, showing a series of sketchbook portraits of young men and eroticised male nudes. Such openly queer subject matter was daring at a time when homosexuality was criminalised and repressed, particularly during the conservative McCarthy era. The proto-Pop artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, both gay themselves, derided Warhol as ‘too swish’; in 1959 a number of Warhol’s other ‘boy drawings’ would be rejected as inappropriate by the fashionable Tanager Gallery. Warhol was nonetheless successful in balancing his commercial work with his more risqué ventures at the Bodley, laying the foundations for the radical, subversive Pop practice that would change the world in the 1960s.
Warhol’s third exhibition at the Bodley Gallery, A Show of Golden Pictures by Andy Warhol, opened in December 1957, including many of the drawings reproduced in A Gold Book and coinciding with its release. Blake Gopnik observes that ‘unlike his gilded shoes, the subjects of Warhol’s A Gold Book now had a sobriety and lyrical bent that were meant to flag their more serious artistic ambitions’ (B. Gopnik, Warhol: A Life as Art, New York 2020, p. 168). The present work’s image was the only male nude to be included in the book. It bears comparison to the delicate drawings of Henri Matisse and Jean Cocteau: Warhol was known to particularly admire the latter’s 1924 volume of Dessins. For all its economy, however, Golden Nude’s nod to the language of gilded icons—Warhol had been raised a Byzantine Catholic, and would go on to invoke devotional imagery across his practice—implies a provocative play with the sacred and profane. The picture also captures a moment of unguarded intimacy, providing an insight into an artist whose façade was never quite as blank as it seemed. ‘If you want to know about Andy Warhol,’ he would claim a decade later, ‘then just look at the surface of my pictures, and there I am; there’s nothing in between’ (A. Warhol, quoted by G. Berg, ‘Andy: My True Story’, Los Angeles Free Press, 17 March 1967, p. 3).