Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin: Andy Warhol: Sense of drag and fumbling

The New National Gallery in Berlin now also has an important work of art that projects into the present, but it absolutely doesn’t want it. A few weeks ago, the artist Dafne B placed her “tank barrier” in front of the house as a sign of peace. The management protested violently. The piece, which weighs several tons, is now a bit out of the way on a green area, but anyone who approaches the National Gallery from behind, which is recommended anyway, can still see it. There is currently an exhibition in the pavilion about Andy Warhol, beauty and being gay.

What should a national gallery that wants to honor its name do in times when military prowess is required? Certainly not setting up anti-tank barriers. It still seems too early to take Arno Breker and similar glorifiers of the war-ready body out of the depot. So we approach the male ideal of the warrior through muscles and “beauty” – albeit with difficulty. Because, as director Klaus Biesenbach complained, the entire undertaking is once again underfinanced. Without the help of the very rich “Friends of the National Gallery” nothing would work (a few friends will probably be there too).

Athletes from Warhol’s private box, curated by the boss himself and his adlata Lisa Botti, assisted by 20 employees – let’s see whether this can be used to make a state or at least a nation. A good 300 works are on display, mostly smaller graphic or photographic works. And yet some interesting background is offered. Who would have thought that the very early Warhol was influenced by Jean Cocteau? Warhol’s “Gold Book” shows this influence particularly in the nude drawings.

Cocteau was frowned upon in Europe, not only because of his intimate association with Breker and the Nazis, but also because he was gay. There are marginal comments about the writers Francis Ponge and André Breton – depressingly clear, for that matter. In the USA, on the other hand, Cocteau’s films, particularly “The Blood of a Poet” (1930), exerted a significant influence on the avant-garde, such as the young Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren. That would be the surreal Cocteau, but there is also the gay one, such as that of the “White Book” (1928). There are erotic drawings that Warhol clearly imitates.

On closer inspection, this Cocteau strand runs through the entire erotic work. The “Sex Parts” from the mid-1970s are not minor works, but real, hitherto little-known major works. In one picture in the series we see a man’s bottom, another’s erect penis, and anal intercourse is initiated. The whole thing is arranged extremely cleverly and pleasantly – just like Cocteau.

Otherwise, images of well-built, clean-shaven, athletic male bodies dominate; The images were created using different techniques, but they were always preceded by photographs. The torso paintings, for example, are based on over 1,600 Polaroids of almost exclusively male nudes.

The paintings toured around the world from 1977 to 1979. But what reminds aesthetes of Michelangelo could simply be taken from the most influential gay magazine in the USA in the 1950s: “Physique Pictorial”. His pictures of hunks posing half-naked circulated in the American gay scene and influenced an entire generation, including Warhol, who, however, retained a sense of drag and fumbling and even showed himself in fumbling. The drag queen Wilhelmina Ross makes a flamboyant appearance right at the entrance to the exhibition.

This is where the question arises as to whether Warhol’s bodies are really that warlike. The fact that they (are supposed to) appear erotic does not in itself contradict this. Breker’s warriors and their dick pomp also seemed erotic to many, but they wouldn’t have easily gotten along with drag queens. After all, the fitness of Warhol’s preferred actors is close to what is called “compulsibility” in queer studies, i.e. to the fiction of the healthy, capable body. But just as it is possible to give a male mannequin a military look, it is also possible, conversely, to make a soldier a mannequin, which would even be a civilian act.

In passing, it should be mentioned that Biesenbach admits to having performed community service; This now seems to take courage. The questionability of his exhibition lies not in the “velvet rage,” the “velvet rage,” that it wants to document, i.e. Warhol’s openly gay life, but in the alleged “beauty.”

Beauty, writes Biesenbach, was something Warhol sought because he was an ugly duckling himself. Agreed. Beauty, Biesenbach continues, is also “timeless.” People suspected it, even feared it, but on the country’s hastily taken path back to the pre-modern era, complete with military and authorities, we have now returned to Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s “ideal beauty”, the old attempt of the bourgeoisie to free itself from the evils of the time and one’s own bloody actions to relax in well-cushioned metaphysics. This ideology, which was long thought to have been overcome, proves how perfectly the exhibition fits into our times.

Andy Warhol can’t help it. By the way, what the curators claim is not true: before their show, one could never have guessed that the artist was also a person with a private life. This could be seen quite amusingly in a presentation of his photographs (“Social Disease”) in 1992. My favorite in it is a dachshund with a piloleus and cassock: “Andy Warhol’s dog Archie, dressed as the Pope.”

»Andy Warhol. Velvet Rage and Beauty«. New National Gallery, Berlin, Kulturforum, until October 6th.