Is andy warhol gay
Dandy Andy: Warhol’s Queer History
Join musician educators for Dandy Andy, a monthly tour that focuses on Warhol’s homosexual history. While his sexuality is frequently suppressed or debated, Warhol was a gay man who had several partners throughout his existence. Warhol’s boyfriends, including Edward Wallowitch, John Giorno, and Jed Johnson, were also his colleagues and collaborators, helping to shape and describe his career as an artist. This tour traces Warhol’s romantic relationships and queer identity against the backdrop of the historical same-sex attracted rights movement in the United States. Tours meet on the museum’s seventh floor.
How Andy Warhol Revolutionized Art & Sexuality
My profile picture on Affinity Magazine is me in front of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans when I visited the Museum of Modern Art during my day spent in Recent York City support in September 2014. The photo is quite old, but I can clearly recall the diurnal I visited the gallery; I ate a crepe and drank peppermint tea before taking a short walk from the cafe over to MoMA. I also went only hours before my flight back house to Toronto, so my mind was packed with bittersweet emotions. But what distracted me from having to go away was all of the art I viewed while wandering around the museum. And although I cherished the expressionism of Marc Chagall‘s work and the calming blue hues of Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, there was something inherently moving in each canvas of Warhol’s depiction of Campbell’s soup that I couldn’t describe.
Andrew van der Vlies
In a 1963 ARTNews magazine interview with the critic Gene Swenson, Andy Warhol famously stated – apparently in all seriousness – that ‘everybody should be a machine’. The same interview included other pithy responses: everyone ‘should like everybody’, and pop art was, in essence, about ‘liking things’.[1] Warhol’s personal reputation as reticent and fond of gnomic or evasive answers, and his professional reputation as an artist fascinated with commodification, mechanisation, seriality and the surface, have long relied on soundbites such as these. And yet the published account of this interview omitted, apparently at the behest of a bigoted editor, a crucial framing context. Swenson had opened with a leading question: ‘What do you say about homosexuals?’[2] In the full transcript, Warhol’s responses can thus more fully be seen for what they most likely were: performatively affectless statements, offered in a knowing, ironically smooth manner, cultivated to subvert the art world’s predilection for exaggeratedly straight (and straight-talking) male musician personae.
The full transcript also includes interventions from three associates, including studio assis
Happy birthday, Andy! The after time artist would have been 71 today. One of the 20th century's best-known painters, he is ironically most famous for his quote about being known (for 15 minutes). But still, there are many simple facts about the man's life that the ordinary person may not know. I thought I'd share some.
- He was gay. It's obvious now, but it wasn't to the public at large during Warhol's life. Keep in mind that in the '70s and early '80s, most Americans were unknowing about gay signifiers; limited even guessed that the Village People were male lover, much less Andy Warhol.
- He was bald. Even I didn't know for years that his funky silver-white hair was, in truth, a wig. Warhol went bald in his in advance twenties.
- He was celibate. Though gay, Warhol claimed never to have engaged in any sexual intercourse. It was reported in an early biography that he lost his virginity at 25 to his first boyfriend, but I've set up no accounts of him consummating any of his subsequent relationships.
- His real last name was Warhola. Warhol was the son of Czech immigrants. He dropped the "a" at the end of his surname early in his career.
- He almost never lived apart from his mother. Even during