Sex Parts

Andy Warhol Sex Parts is a range of artworks created by artist Andy Warhol.

The Torso Series were paintings whereas Sex Parts were prints. According to Victor Bockris, Sex Parts were never exhibited. However, they did show up in the Richard Gere film American Gigolo hanging in the drug dealer’s living room.

Walter Steding, who was Ronnie Cutrone’s roommate and, like Ronnie, also worked for Warhol as a painting assistant, described his involvement with Sex Parts:

“Someone came by saying they had a really big dick. Andy said ‘Well, let’s take a picture of it,’ and then the pictures came to me as the person who had to put them somewhere. I wrote on the box Sex Parts. Then Andy did a whole series of prints called Sex Parts because he saw it written on the box. He would take pictures over a period of a couple of hours of two men screwing. He had a 35mm as well as a Polaroid. I was just sort of there… But I don’t think these situations turned him on. In order for Andy to have sex it had to be totally separated from his art, because with art he was only allowed to be a spectator…”

Warhol’s main painting assistant, Ronnie Cutrone, recalled both his and Victor Hugo’s involvement with the project:

“Victor Hugo… would recruit people from the baths in those days. I was there for all the shootings but not for the recruiting. The choreography was basically strip and make yourself comfortable. Andy was a very shy, coy voyeur. He was like, ‘Oh, oh, oh, that’s so great. Oh, what can it do? Oh, what a big one. Boy, I wonder how it would look stuck in there?’… It was so wierd and so innocent at the same time – just like all of Andy’s sex. There was that period at the Factory when it was just boys and I would bring girls up to piss all over the oxidation paintings. And there would be guys sucking and fucking and Andy would be taking pictures. Later they euphemized the series and called it the Torsos. It used to drive Brigid Berlin nuts. Brigid could go from being the most insane person in the world to a conservative, homophobic, right-wing Reaganite in a matter of four seconds and then back to a total maniac.”

When Andy Warhol first burst onto the artistic stage in the 1960s’, he did so by incorporating images that were firmly embedded in the American psyche. His bright and colorful paintings and serigraphs presented images that were commonplace — a soup can or coke bottle — but were transformed by his technique into artistic icons of popular culture. Warhol was most interested in image and not reality, although one could say that by casting these mass produced commercial images in his own unique style, Warhol was making a comment on the reality of living in a world that was dominated by images from the advertising and entertainment industries. Warhol’s prints are in essence images of images. They are at least once removed, and often several times removed, from reality. His famous prints of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, not to mention countless other celebrities, are based on photographs. As in the case with Marilyn Monroe, many of those photographs are of his subjects posing as a character, not as themselves, a subtle reminder that once someone achieves a certain celebrity status, they become further and further removed from their real selves. How many layers must one remove to finally see the real person depicted in a Warhol print?