Andy Warhol, Two Male Heads, circa 1952, ink on manila paper, 16 5/8 x 14 inches (42.2 x 35.6 cm). © 2026 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
A couple of years before his untimely death, I played a mean trick on my friend Matt Wrbican, the legendary archivist at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. I asked him to comment on three unknown illustrations by “Warhol,” which he did with pleasure and insight—not realizing they were by three of his hero’s contemporaries. My point was that Warhol’s 1950s works were less unique than fans tend to think, part of a larger stylistic trend that was channeling the well-established look of various European moderns. As a New York Times critic said in 1956, Warhol’s drawings “might have been done by Jean Cocteau on a bad day,” and, of course, Cocteau himself was riffing on Matisse.
What I should have realized, however, was that there was a body of 1950s works whose attribution Matt would have been certain to get right: Warhol’s drawings of his male friends and lovers, often naked or nearly so, or even, occasionally, in the throes of gay sex. No other American artist of their era could have made them.
Those drawings—a broad selection of them will be presented by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts at Independent 20th Century—might not have had much novel style; they were in “the classic tradition,” said the New York Herald Tribune. But even the tamest among them could also be decried by critics as “in doubtful taste” and full of “private meaning,” and that is what mattered and matters about them. They pointed—Cocteau-like, in fact—to a world of homosexual pleasures and tastes and amity that normally stayed unrepresented, and it is the pointing, rather than style, that is at the heart of Warhol’s achievement in them (and in most of his best art). By keeping the look of his drawings fairly tame, Warhol let them function as almost transparent carriers of their radical content. In a departure from some 75 years of formalist attention to innovation in visual style—style having come to count as the “art” for whose sake art must be made—Warhol’s drawings said that art might be made only for the sake of the world that it showed.
Mimmo Rotella, Arachidina, 1963, décollage on canvas,
54 3/8 x 37 1/2 inches (138.1 x 95.3 cm). Courtesy of VOENA.
But we should not imagine that Warhol, whatever his genius, was alone in taking steps in this direction. At that same moment in the 1950s, the world was coming into art, unchanged, thanks to the resurgence of Duchamp among so-called neo-Dada artists of New York. It is also in 1953, after a trip to the United States, that the Italian Mimmo Rotella first started to tear posters off urban walls and treat those décollages (“ungluings”) as his creations. VOENA will display a group of these works at Independent.
The French critic Pierre Restany, one of Rotella’s first and then most ardent supporters, once referred to the Italian’s “appropriative technique,” and I think that is an important corrective to a more standard view of Rotella as a purveyor of “found abstraction”—as a formalist, that is, rather than an heir to Duchamp and his anti-retinal appropriations. While it is true that, in many or even most cases, Rotella assembled and reworked bits and pieces of his found posters into his final compositions—a “retinal” move, for sure—it is very hard to tell that is the case. Whatever their true origin stories, Rotella’s works look like straight appropriations from urban walls—the world, brought unchanged into the gallery, the better for us to see it—so, culturally, they function as though they were that. (I have a feeling that Rotella and his followers stressed that “reworking,” out of fear the artist would get too little credit for his creations, and to make him fit among formalist peers. But how different is a lovely piece like his Arachidina (1963) from something Rotella actually saw on the street?)
In Duchampian terms, we might call Rotella’s décollages “assisted readymades made to look unassisted.” And, of course, when Rotella’s torn posters come “inside,” their signifieds come with them: Blackness, in the figure of an “exotic” singer, in one; “whiteness,” in the image of a “typical” homemaker in an ad “unglued” by Rotella; urban decay—and urban energy—in the damage registered in Rotella’s ephemeral sources. Rotella’s décollages work as what we might call “natural synecdoches” for the world they are torn from, because they seem torn straight from it.
Harold Stevenson, Untitled, circa 1960s, pastel on paper, 12 x 15 3/4 inches (30.5 x 40 cm). Courtesy of the Estate of Harold Stevenson and Andrew Kreps Gallery.
Harold Stevenson, Untitled, 1969, oil on canvas, 49 x 45 1/2 inches (124.5 x 115.6 cm). Courtesy of the Estate of Harold Stevenson and Andrew Kreps Gallery.
Mimmo Rotella, Exotic, 1961, décollage on canvas, 41 3/4 x 49 1/4 inches (106 x 125.1 cm). Courtesy of VOENA.
Rosalyn Drexler, Love in the Green Room, 1963, acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 30 x 24 inches (76.2 x 61 cm). Courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery.
But I get the feeling that, right through the early 1960s, just pointing at the world, or bringing it in from outside, was not quite “fancy” enough to easily count as art, especially when, as with Warhol, the pointing spoke to issues of sex and gender that his viewers preferred to leave camouflaged behind style.
Evidence for this comes in the early 1960s, shortly after Warhol traded his drawn penises for paintings of soup cans that were so free of style that critics confused them with the cans themselves. A gay friend and peer of his, Harold Stevenson, had begun to make entirely forthright, highly realistic images of naked men, often in extreme close-up, like details of nipples and mouths that Andrew Kreps Gallery will present at Independent. By the fall of 1963, the Feigen/Herbert gallery in New York dared to exhibit The New Adam, Stevenson’s forty-foot male nude, which curator Lawrence Alloway had recently planned on including in his Six Painters and the Object show at the Guggenheim, but, in the end, rejected. He had traded Stevenson’s magnum opus for work by Robert Rauschenberg, in order to avoid, he said, “exhibiting a nude with a phallus the size of a man.”
The nudity and its homoerotics might certainly have been part of the problem. (Although the prudish New York Times had no problem discussing The New Adam at Feigen/Herbert.) But it is worth noticing that almost all the paintings in Alloway’s exhibition—including by its several gay artists—had a far bigger dose of ambitious and visibly contemporary style than Stevenson’s nude. Even the Warhols that Alloway included were notably less direct, less semiotically transparent, than his earlier Soup Cans and soon-to-arrive Brillo Boxes—or than his 1950s penises. Stevenson’s neglect of “style” may have been as much of a problem as the dick this neglect helped him point to.
Rosalyn Drexler, Untitled, 1963, acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 23 x 26 inches (58.4 x 66 cm). Courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery.
The paintings of Rosalyn Drexler, another New Yorker present at the birth of Pop Art in the early ‘60s, did some of the same work, for the female experience, that Warhol had earlier done for gay love and Stevenson was then doing. In Drexler’s works brought to Independent by Garth Greenan Gallery, she takes an almost Cindy Sherman-ish pleasure in appropriating the images of women that she found in popular media and transferring them directly into her art. In her paintings, women are assaulted by men, or fend them off, or are carried off as victims, or succumb to their caresses, but, reflecting the larger culture of that moment, rarely stand on their own. Drexler’s paintings do not completely escape the rhetorics of style that had dominated modernism for all her life; they try hard to be “interesting looking,” so the access they give to their content is not fully direct. But I can easily imagine them without their modernist gloss of flatness and colored fields, and doing just as much good work in the process. I would say that Drexler had already achieved such directness, in the 1950s, when she toured North America as the female wrestler “Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire,” thereby “appropriating” the culture and imagery of that marginal, gender-skewed, ethnically-marked world into the performance of her own life. I think Warhol was recognizing that gambit of Drexler’s, when, in one of his earlier Pop works, he silkscreened a photo of her as a wrestler.
Banners by Nicholas Krushenick, Ernest Trova, Jack Youngerman, George Ortman, Richard Lindner, and Roy Lichtenstein, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, circa 1965. Courtesy of Multiples, Inc. / Marian Goodman Gallery.
By the end of the 1960s, the problem of modern “style,” of its excesses and limitations, had begun to creep into the art world’s consciousness. That was explicit in the new conceptualism, and in the “documentary turn” photography was just then beginning to take. But I think that we can see hints of it already in the Pop-y “banners” being presented at Independent 20th Century by Marian Goodman Gallery. In her initial forays into the art world, six decades and more ago, Goodman had a hand in the banners’ production, first with the Betsy Ross Flag & Banner Company and then at Multiples, Inc., which she co-founded. The banners, by artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, and Warhol, are as “stylish” as any modern art could be. Their sheer material presence, however, as “home goods,” makes them sit comfortably inside our world, as a part of it, whereas images—even ones as direct as Warhol’s penises—always seem to point to some reality beyond ours. (In this, the banners come closer to Rotella’s very material décollages.) I had the luck to grow up with Lichtenstein’s 1966 banner titled Night Seascape, and, despite something forbidding about its nocturnal imagery and color, it carried some of the comfort of our family’s Dansk placemats and pots. It did not have to appropriate the world into art, because it automatically made art just another part of our world.
General Idea, Great AIDS (Ultramarine Blue), 1990/2019, acrylic on linen, 59 by 59 inches (149.9 x 149.9 cm). © The Estate of General Idea. Courtesy of The Estate and Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
As always in art, issues that seem vital at one moment can almost disappear from view in the next. In 1987, when the Canadian trio General Idea began to produce the AIDS work that Mitchell-Innes & Nash will include in its exhibition of the group at Independent, there were more pressing things to think about than a few penis drawings and whether they were on the frontier of modern style. So, in turning Robert Indiana’s famous four-letter icon of “LOVE,” from 1964, into a four-letter scream that said “AIDS,” General Idea piggybacked on an earlier Pop moment, without carrying over all the issues that structured its art. The goal was to make AIDS as absolutely present and immediate, to its viewers, as Warhol and Stevenson had done for homoerotics and Drexler had done for the female condition. But now the “transparent” language to do that in—the language that let AIDS speak as an issue, rather than as mere “art”—was the well-established language of 1960s Pop. Avant-garde style had stopped being a “problem” to be dealt with, maybe even neutralized to let content speak, and had instead become a selling point, a kind of advertising trope, that General Idea could use to “sell” the notion that AIDS was a crisis. The modern art of the 1960s, that is, had become the new “classic tradition,” such as Warhol had deployed in his gay drawings; that meant General Idea could use the accepted stylings of Pop as a vehicle to get at something more urgent than style.
Blake Gopnik is an art critic, historian, and biographer in New York. From 2001 to 2011, he was the chief art critic of The Washington Post and since 2013 has been a contributing critic to The New York Times. He is the author of Warhol, a comprehensive biography of the Pop artist, and of The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and his American Dream. He has a doctorate in the history of art from Oxford University.
