How much would you pay for a painted canvas sprayed with urine?

$1.9 million US was the amount that a collector paid in 2008 for a canvas at Christie’s Auction House in New York that the auction catalog primly described as, “Oxidation Painting - copper metallic pigment and urine on canvas”. The work is one of a series “painted” in 1978 by the king of Pop Art, Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987), arguably the most influential artist of his era.

Warhol actually produced two types of piss paintings. In the earlier version, canvases were stained with piss to produce an abstract expressionist effect. Most of these early works were never sold nor documented. However, in 1977, Warhol and assistant Ronnie Catrone started experimenting with canvases prepared with metallic compounds which were then pissed upon, resulted in dramatic colors, mostly golds and greens, which were more interesting and sellable. These paintings are more specifically referred to as the oxidation paintings.

 

From 1977 – 78, Warhol produced a whole series of oxidation paintings, with Catrone and Hugo Victor, the boyfriend of fashion designer, Halston, taking turns urinating on canvases. According to author Paul Alexander¹, "Rumor had it that Warhol chose Hugo to do the urinating because Hugo had an unusually large bladder, not to mention an unusually large penis.” According to one of his collaborators, the piss paintings "were surprisingly well received when they were displayed in Europe the following year. One critic hailed them as 'Warhol at his purest'”. In America, the paintings were not shown in a group, until a 2002 exhibition of Warhol’s piss and sex paintings.

 

 

Was Andy Warhol gay?

For some reason, many reference sources, including Wikipedia, struggle to answer this question in a straight forward manner. Andy Warhol was totally queer. Perhaps, the confusion about his sexuality is the result of Warhol’s own calculated control of his public image, which he cultivated to support his achievement of fame and wealth. In his artwork, he covertly broadcasted his involvement with gay subculture, as in his portraits of gay icons and drag queens, the significance of which mainstream America was oblivious to at the time. Later in his career when he had achieved fame, Warhol even writes in his book, The Warhol Diaries, about his relationships and fascination with several men.

Was Andy Warhol into Piss?

  In the catalog for a 2002 exhibition of Warhol’s piss and sex paintings², Bruce Hainley, art critic and then a Contributing Editor of Artforum Magazine, deftly skirted the issues of physical piss and Warhol’s interest in piss; instead focusing on their beauty and Warhol’s creative process. He wrote,

In December 1977 Andy Warhol began to make a series of elegant, abstract paintings. These iridescent canvases, made up of coppery yellows, oranges and verdant green strokes, pools and drips, offered Warhol's viewer a sensuous and very physical enjoyment of paint, quite at odds with the crisper images one found in his Pop vocabulary.” Regardless of the academic nature of the writer’s prose, the sensuous language he uses in the catalog, underscores a sense of fascination that the artist may have had with piss. "Like blood, urine is rich in DNA The Oxidations are portraits... They're also self-portraits… Doggedly marked territories, they trace signs of identity, even if that identity is unknown (or unknowable).

These eloquent words describe how many piss tops feel about the act of domination and “marketing territory”. In a later catalog passage, the critic stated that piss painting was a way for Warhol to become part of the art process, in a similar manner as abstract expressionist Jack Pollack used his body to be "in the art".

Warhol’s interest in Piss Painting may have been fueled by the emerging popularity of watersports in the gay community, and his own visits to some of New York’s sleazier clubs. According to Bob Colacello, a friend and writer for Warhol’s Interview Magazine³,

By 1977, Manhattan boasted at least a dozen thriving gay bathhouses, although they were considered a bit passé compared to the backroom bars of the far West Village... Andy only went to the Anvil once, as far as I know, and he never went to the Toilet, though he also once went to the Eagle's Nest... where he was fascinated, he told me, by a man who urinated in an empty beer bottle and left it on the bar for someone else to drink. 'They were all fighting over it,' he said. 'It was so abstract.'

Did Andy ever piss on his own canvases?

Bob Colacello recalls,

My diary shows that when he first began the series in December 1977, he did - I didn't witness the act of creation, he referred to it in passing. But he soon turned to Victor and Ronnie, as usual preferring to have others do the repetitive technical work for him. And there were many others: boys who'd come to lunch and drink too much wine, and find it funny or even flattering to be asked to help Andy 'paint'. Andy always had a little extra bounce in his walk as he led them to his studio... Victor was showing up with ever larger numbers of 'assistants', hired by the hour at the Everard and St. Marks Baths.

In a recent interview in New York Magazine, one of Andy young, boy toy friends at the time, revealed,

I was excited to meet Andy because I heard that his boyfriend, Jed Johnson, was a twin. I wanted Andy to like me...

I mean, I did piss on his “Piss” paintings, but that was later, and he wanted me to. I would bring cute friends of mine, and Andy would watch. He didn’t touch himself, but he did this moaning. “Oh!…Oh!…” It was like he was having an orgasm while he watched us. Or at least faking one. And then he would take us to lunch and give us $100, or some of his silk-screen wallpaper of the cow or of Mao.

Ah, what an artist must suffer for his art!

While $1.9 million US was recently paid for one of Warhol’s piss paintings (no doubt the product of one of the Factory’s piss parties), this amount is small compared to the highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting. A 2009 article in The Economist reported that one Warhol’s most famous works, a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises, had sold for $100 million US, placing Warhol into an elite club of six other artists whose works have matched that price, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-August Renoir, Gustav Klimt and Willem de Kooning.

 

References:

¹ (Paul Alexander, Death and Disaster, The Rise of the Warhol Empire and the Race for Andy's Millions. 1994)

² (Bruce Hainley, "Urine Sample" in Exh. Cat., New York. Gagosian Gallery, Andy Warhol: Piss & Sex Paintings and Drawings. September - November 2002, pp. 7-8)

³ (Warholstars.org for numerous citing in this article and for background material used to create it. Warholstars.org is a private on-going research project and is not affiliated with any other person or institution.)