Michael Dayton Hermann’s Andy Warhol. Love, Sex, and Desire. Drawings 1950–1962  brings together over 300 drawings of men reveling in the pleasure of youth, beauty, and the flesh that are rarely seen. 

In 1952 an unknown Warhol had been working on a series of elegant line drawings celebrating queer love – a style and subject that couldn’t be less fitting to the American audience. Enthralled by hypermasculine ideals and Abstract Expressionist aesthetics, galleries balked at Warhol’s efforts to show his work but the then 24-year-old artist would not be denied.

The book brings together over 300 drawings rendered primarily in ink on paper of men reveling in the pleasure of youth, beauty, and the flesh. Their defining characteristic is a palpable sense of unbridled sexuality, one made all the more alluring by its defiance against societal norms. At a time when homosexuality was illegal and full-frontal male nudity was considered “obscene,” simply looking at the male body was an act of liberation, defiance, and pure delight.

Andy Warhol. Love, Sex, and Desire. Drawings 1950–1962 by Michael Dayton Hermann, Drew Zeiba and Blake Gopnik is published by Taschen.