? The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London 2009
Boy with Thumb in Mouth
1956
- Artist Rooms
Warhol?s voyeuristic interest in the male body can be seen throughout his oeuvre, from films such as `Sleep? of 1963 through to his stitched photographs of 1986. This fascination is first evident in his early line drawings of young men from the mid to late 1950s, of which many were included in his `Drawings for a Boy Book? exhibition at the Bodley Gallery, New York in 1956. In this drawing Warhol depicts a young man with his thumb in his mouth, simplified and with all unnecessary detail removed. The style of Warhol?s boy drawings such as `Boy with Thumb in Mouth?, show similarities to the work of Henri Matisse and Jean Cocteau, of whom both employed a reductive linear drawing technique and whose work Warhol admired.
