Male Figure. 1954.
Ball-point drawing.
With the estate stamp and the stamp of the Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts and the hand-written number “221.009 1/6” as well as inscribed “SF”. On off-white paper. 35 x 28 cm (13.7 x 11 in), the full sheet. [JS].

PROVENANCE: From the artist's estate (stamped on the reverse).
Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York (stamped on the reverse).
Galerie Jörg Schumacher, Frankfurt am Main.
Private collection, South Germany (acquired from the above in 2014).

"If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There is nothing behind it." (Andy Warhol, quoted from: Andy Warhol. Frühe Zeichnungen aus der Sammlung Marx, ed. by Heiner Bastian, Munich 2011, p. 106). In his early portrait drawings, Andy Warhol had already declared the shallowness of representation his artistic program. A strictly linear drawing style rooted in Warhol's early career as a commercial artist, which almost entirely excludes internal contours, is the decisive basis for the distinctive alienation effect that is particularly characteristic of his early portraits of young men. Warhol thus largely liberates the portrait from its defining characteristic, its resemblance to the sitter, thereby creating the art-historical paradox of a de-individualized portrait. This effect is intensified in the present drawing by the fact that it is not the facial features of the subject that are the focus of the image, but rather the background covered with heart shapes and the stylized heart with a keyhole on the subject's chest, symbolizing the search for love. [JS]

In good condition. Corners and edges with isolated minimal bumping and isolated faint creasing and rubbing in the margins.