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By the mid 1950s, the art scene in New York was all about abstract expressionism and the loose coalition of diverse artists known as the New York School. Andy Warhol – as a figurative artist, as a commercial artist and as an openly gay man – was not part of this world.

AbEx works were bold, often radical in technique and predominantly abstract. They embodied other values too: authenticity (painting as a revelation of the artist’s unique identity), intuitive process (as opposed to craft), the importance of scale (works were huge) and a certain macho muscularity (with either dynamic gesture or energetic application of colour at its core).

The artists of the New York School who championed this style lived downtown in neighbouring industrial-scale studios, philosophising, painting, carousing – and often competing – with each other.

Even if their work was not understood or appreciated by a wide public, the artists themselves had become famous. Popular press pieces named Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning as the ‘strongest, most important’ painters of the period. In the public imagination, they had become the very embodiment of what a ‘real’ artist should be: strong, masculine, intuitive, serious – and straight.
Warhol was different.

The photograph shows: (front row) Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko; (middle row) Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin; (back row) Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne.

Andy Warhol’s early ‘fine art’ work referred in many ways to his sexual identity as a gay man. According to several of his contemporaries, it was often the work’s overtly homosexual content that prevented it from being accepted by the ‘right’ galleries or taken seriously by the establishment.

College classmate and fellow artist Philip Pearlstein recalled Warhol submitting a group of drawings of ‘boys kissing boys’ to the Tanger Gallery in the late 1950s. According to Pearlstein, the gallery saw them as ‘totally unacceptable, as far as the subject goes… The men in the gallery were all macho – you know, de Kooning was the big dog.’

Even among his fellow commercial artists, he was an outsider. He once asked a friend why he wasn’t liked by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (who, like Warhol, were gay and were designing shop window displays). He was told: ‘You’re too swish, and that upsets them… you’re a commercial artist, which really bugs them because when they do commercial art – windows and other jobs – they do it just “to survive”. They won’t even use their real names. Whereas you’ve won prizes! You’re famous for it!’