JTF (just the facts): A mixed show of photographs and drawings, framed and hung against white walls in the small, single room gallery space.

The following works are included in the show:

• 2 graphite on paper drawings, 1977, each sized roughly 36×28 inches, unique (framed in silver and unmatted)
• 22 Polaroid prints (Polacolor Type 108), 1976, 1976-1977, 1977, each sized roughly 3×4 (or the reverse) inches, unique (framed in white and matted)

(Installation shots below.)

Comments/Context: For the purposes of appropriateness in critical arts writing, it’s not entirely clear what words we should be using to describe the male backside. It seems we might be altogether safe with bland equivalents like buttocks, bottom, rear end, and behind, but perhaps stray a little too much into common slang with butt and ass. The only reason to start a review with such a terminology discussion is that this gallery show is entirely made up of Andy Warhol’s cropped views of nude male backsides, and so getting our subject matter language straight (and proper) from the beginning will hopefully avoid some amount of distraction later.

At this point in Warhol’s much analyzed artistic history, it’s decently well understood that during the 1970s and 1980s, he was liberally using a camera in his art making life, taking his Big Shot Polaroid along with him wherever he went to shoot countless party pictures and flash lit faces, which he often later used as visual raw material for his silkscreened paintings. The photographic male nudes in this show (made in 1976 and 1977) sit at the intersection of two intriguing artistic impulses that Warhol was exploring relatively simultaneously at that time – a broader interest in using erotic homosexual subject matter in his work and the formal possibilities he was discovering (and amplifying) in meticulously arranged photographic still lifes. His pared down backside nudes intimately blend these two modes of artistic thinking, applying a distanced almost analytical (but still desiring) perspective to the abstract contours of the male body.

Back a decade earlier, Warhol had begun to incorporate more explicit material into his work, particularly in short films like “Blow Job” (1964) and “Blue Movie” (1969), but by the mid-1970s, he seems to have been more comfortable with his own homosexuality, to the point that it could become a more active locus of his art making. Male models were recruited at gay clubs and bathhouses around New York City and photographed nude back at the Factory, the images ultimately becoming various silkscreened series: Torsos (1977), Sex Parts (1978) and Fellatio (1978). The Torsos pictures generally featured the nude upper bodies, mid sections, and well endowed lower views of anonymous men, while the Sex Parts and Fellatio projects were even more sexually graphic and explicit, even when reduced to gestural black-and-white markings. (As an aside, portions of the Sex Parts portfolio are concurrently on view in a separate gallery show here).

At roughly the same time, and on through the early 1980s, Warhol was also busy making photographs of arrangements of various still life objects. He made images of knives, guns, crosses, bananas, lobsters, shoes, flowers, perfume bottles, champagne glasses, and even a hammer and sickle, iteratively testing out compositions and groupings. When they click just right, these systematic still life experiments are filled with graphic energy and symbolic resonance, the formal relationships and spatial ordering of the objects elegantly coming together in precise patterns and repeated motifs. (A 2020 gallery show sampler of Warhol’s photography, reviewed here, included several of these still lifes.)

Which brings us all the way back to the photographs of male butts in this show, that essentially combine these two artistic through lines. As it turns out, there aren’t an infinite number of ways to photograph a backside, and in the span of these images, Warhol tries nearly all of them. Most of the images feature an anonymous standing body, with the photographer rotating around one side or another, but there are of course other possible poses – lying down, bent over, on all fours, with legs together or apart – that can be seen from various angles. The only other variables Warhol introduces are the placement of hands (in front, behind, folded, and in one case, tied together at the wrists with duct tape), the wearing of torn underwear, and the hint of a penis. And so it is inside this constrained universe of options that Warhol iterates and experiments, creating a veritable typology of possible male rear ends.

What I find amazing about these photographs is that even inside this very tightly constrained artistic box that Warhol has defined for himself, he still finds a way to make pictures that are uniquely his own. Part of this comes from their signature aesthetics, the flash-lit intimacy of Warhol’s eye exaggerating outlines and creating a brashly sensual voyeuristic mood. But these pictures are, at the same time, altogether formal and in many cases almost classical, pulling back from extreme closeness to a more distant and aloof reserve, where the watching is taking place from afar, turning the bodies into studies of contours like “landscapes”, as shaped by light and shadow. And it is the tension of this artistic (and emotional) push and pull that gives these elemental backside pictures their enduring energy.

This show also includes two pencil drawings Warhol made using the photographs as source material, which find Warhol simplifying the compositions even further, reducing them to essential lines. But in re-interpreting the images, a similar sense of uneasy oscillation emerges once again, with attraction and abstraction continuing to wrestle for aesthetic dominance.

In the end, this is a small show in a single room space, offering what amounts to a one note study of Warhol’s interest in a vaguely esoteric subject. But with all those caveats, this show still delivers some thrilling punch, which is to Warhol’s credit. If you were curating a show of notable male nudes from across the history of photography, these Warhol Polaroids would likely make the cut, if only because they so clearly represent his unique point of view.

Collector’s POV: The photographs in this show are priced at $15000 each. Warhol’s photographs can be regularly found in the secondary markets, with prices in recent years ranging between $2000 and $420000, with the price for the Polaroid portraits often influenced by the relative fame of the person pictured.