Warhol’s voyeuristic interest in the male body can be seen throughout his oeuvre, from films such as ‘Sleep’ of 1963 to his stitched photographs from 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 in 1956. In this drawing Warhol depicts a young man suggestively licking his lips, his facial features reduced to individual decorative shapes. The style of Warhol’s boy drawings, such as ‘Boy Licking his Lips', 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.