i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

122 / The New York Art NetworkDavid Hockney, was closeted; afterward, gay artists granted themselves permissionto address homosexual subject matters openly in their work. 31 Accordingto the art historian Trevor Fairbrother,In the late 1950s, when Warhol was at the peak of his success as a commercialartist, homosexuals were an invisible minority in the larger world, yet tolerated as asub-group in a few professions—dance, theater, and the ƒne and applied arts . . .[however,] success rested on a foundation of conformity . . . Warhol did not denyhis sexuality in his daily routine, nor did he repress it in his art. 32Such openness was threatening to some gay artists, who feared “that their carefullycarved-out niches would be endangered as soon as someone publicly portrayedand celebrated their lifestyle...” 33 Obviously, Warhol’s actual woundsdid not result from his gay lifestyle, but Neel’s metaphor rings true.Yet Warhol is in a state of suspended animation that suggests that his time,the pop art sixties, had passed. Calvin Tomkins, writing in 1970, provided aparallel description:Andy has been ripped from grace, shot twice in the stomach by a madwoman whomistook him for a God . . . his life nearly extinguished and still not wholly restored tohim . . . Afterwards, he would say that . . . he could not be sure whether he was aliveor dead. Nor can we. Andy kept his cool, but things are not the same . . . Will hisface inhabit the Seventies as it has the Sixties? . . . Andy, in what one fervently hopesis just another put-on, begins to look more and more like the angel of death. 34Undeterred by Warhol’s postmodernist feint, Neel stripped away his carefullyconstructed shell to reveal a suffering modernist artist who was the victim ofhis own success. From the waist up, Warhol is a St. Sebastian whose woundsdisplay the suffering his “cool” self-portraits belie. From the waist down, he is adandy in designer clothes. Is this disjunctive portrait the result of a surrealistgame of Corps Exquis? With his ashen face and hands, Andy is an exquisitecorpse, recently resurrected from the dead and „oating in a sky-blue surround.The famously vacant eyes ƒrmly shut, Andy has seemingly renounced theworld (and the arrows aimed at him), even as his shiny shoes tie him to it. Byrevealing the Catholic Warhol, divided between his religious background andhis earthly desires, 35 Neel presaged in an uncanny way the motifs of Warhol’slate paintings. Neel believed that “the same things are involved in art as are involvedin religion. For one thing this willingness to sacriƒce for it, to give otherthings up for it ...” 36 As a camp-dandy who had publicly renounced all personalfeeling, Neel made Warhol appear to have made the ultimate sacriƒcefor his art. 37