Andy Warhol’s Beauty Problems

Featured in the Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body exhibition catalogue

The exhibition catalogue includes texts by Jessica Beck, James Boaden, Douglas Crimp, and John Giorno and was published with The Andy Warhol Museum in 2016.

Essay Excerpt:

I always hear myself saying, “She’s a beauty!” or “He’s a beauty!” or “What a beauty!” but I never know what I’m talking about. I honestly don’t know what beauty is, not to speak of what “a” beauty is. So that leaves me in a strange position, because I’m noted for how much I talk about “this one’s a beauty” and “that one’s a beauty. —Andy Warhol

“On the surface, it would seem that Andy Warhol’s artistic project was concerned primarily with beauty and celebrity. He surrounded himself with young, attractive people who were hungry for fame; he produced paintings of some of the most glamorous women of the era and spent the latter half of his career rendering flawless portraits of the rich and famous with his bright lights and Polaroid camera. And yet there is a conspicuous lack of beauty in Warhol’s work. A closer look reveals an ongoing reversal of beauty. Are the paintings of Liz, Marilyn, and Jackie testaments to their enduring glamour or to their symbolic roles as bearers of suffering and death? Are the screen tests moving portraits of his young superstars or painful endurance tests before the unflinching and unforgiving lens of the camera? Finally, do the films offer a celebration of the charisma of Warhol’s manufactured, underground stars such as Edie Sedgwick and Mario Montez or an uncomfortable encounter with shame and sexuality?”

About the Catalogue:

When one looks closely and deeply at Andy Warhol’s work, beyond the familiar discussions of celebrity, consumerism, and death, it becomes apparent that his artistic project was intimately engaged with the body. In drawings, photographs, films, prints, and paintings, Warhol provocatively explored the body’s beauty and flaws, fragility and strength, as well as his own insecurities and torments.

Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body sets out to establish the body as a central theme in Warhol’s practice, placing specific attention on the recurrence of imagery related to physical imperfections and the procedures and products used to mend or conceal them. Spanning his early work to paintings made just one year before his death, this exhibition and publication examine how Warhol’s personal history becomes manifest in his work and how his sexuality and approach to self-fashioning shaped his treatment of the body across media. The texts within this publication seek to reveal and unpack the ever-present, even if at times oblique and abstract, trace of the artist as he addresses issues of desire, masculinity, and his struggles with his own image.

For someone so closely aligned with the tropes of beauty, Warhol noticeably cast his “beauties” under a thin veil of pain, anxiety, and suffering. Death, illness, physical fitness, and the myriad ways to fix our most vexing physical imperfec- tions were consistent themes in his work. Segmented and cropped body parts, idealized specimens of the male physique, the mutilated and flayed flesh of accident victims, and awkward depictions of a young boy all present a complicated picture of the human form. From the bodybuilder works to the cosmetic surgery images, there is a personal investment in the subject. There are transformative moments, too, as with paintings in which a bodybuilder and Christ are brought together—a symbolic union of myth and flesh and the complex relationship of shame, sexuality, and the human form.

The Andy Warhol Museum’s art collection and archives provide a particularly close access to and perspective on Warhol and his work. There are valuable treasures yet to be exhibited here. Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body is one attempt, of many, to honor the museum’s collection and un- cover underexplored yet important and timely topics of research.