Be A Somebody With A Body, 1985 by Andy Warhol
- Untitled Art Gallery
- Mar 18, 2019
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 16
Be A Somebody With A Body, 1985; Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas; Dedicated, dated, and signed 'JOHN 85 Andy Warhol' verso on the overlap; Stamped with the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc., stamp and numbered 'A122.0911' on the overlap; Size - Canvas: 8" x 10", Frame 14 3/4" x 18 3/4"; Framed using a black wood frame.
"Muscles are great. Everybody should have at least one they can show off." - Andy Warhol
By the 1970s, Andy Warhol had already begun observing a cultural shift toward gym culture, fitness, and the idealization of the sculpted body. He noted, “So many people have such great bodies today that the sort of lumpy sit-around-the-house flab that used to be normal now looks really bad. You can't go anyplace in America without seeing boys and girls and men and women who look like they have been professional athletes their entire lives.” This growing obsession with physical perfection was mirrored in the art world as well. In 1976, the Whitney Museum held a symposium titled Articulate Muscle: The Male Body in Art, featuring bodybuilders Frank Zane, Ed Corney, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Inspired by Charles Gaines—author of the influential Pumping Iron, the first serious book on bodybuilding—the event framed bodybuilding not as sport but as a form of sculptural, living artistic creation. Schwarzenegger, who knew Warhol personally, recalled, “I became very good friends with Andy Warhol and used to hang out at the Studio in the seventies because he was a big believer in bodybuilding… he helped get bodybuilding out of the dungeon to make it a hip activity.”
Warhol’s interest in bodily transformation had been evident since his early work, such as Before and After (1961), based on a newspaper advertisement showing a woman's nose before and after rhinoplasty. By the 1980s, this fascination converged with the booming fitness industry, rising gym memberships, and the widespread pursuit of “morphological perfection.” Schwarzenegger himself had become a major Hollywood star—an embodiment of the decade’s physique-driven aspirations. For Warhol, he had clearly become “somebody with a body.”
During the 1980s, Warhol embarked on his Black-and-White Ads and Illustrations series, drawing imagery from advertisements, maps, diagrams, and other forms of printed ephemera. Returning to the lowbrow commercial sources he mined in the 1960s, Warhol used them to comment on American consumerism and the seductive, often manipulative language of mass media. His choice of a stark black-and-white palette retained the blunt immediacy of his sources, while also imbuing them with a heightened graphic force.
Be A Somebody With A Body was adapted from an advertisement in a bodybuilding magazine. Warhol preserved the bold, declarative text of the original ad but energized the composition with thick, fluid brushstrokes. The muscular male figure stands as both an accessible ideal and an unattainable fantasy, framed by text that reads as a command rather than a suggestion. The stark, printed lettering combined with expressive brushwork blurs the boundary between mechanical reproduction and painterly gesture—an interplay Warhol mastered throughout his career. The phrase itself exerts an unmistakable pressure: transform your body, and you can transform your identity—from a “nobody” to a “somebody.” Warhol’s career-long critique of commercialization and conformity is palpable here, echoing his famous observation: “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest… you can drink Coke too.”
This work also carries a personal dimension, as it was dedicated to John Reinhold, a diamond dealer, collector, and friend of Warhol. Reinhold famously gave Warhol a jar of diamond dust, inspiring the artist’s celebrated Diamond Dust series. Warhol later created portraits of the Reinhold family and even gave their ten-year-old daughter, Berkeley, a leather-bound diary filled with abstract drawings that gradually developed into a dollar sign—published in 2010 as Andy Warhol: Making Money.
Warhol also produced a “Reversal” version of Be A Somebody With A Body, in which he inverted the black-and-white tonal values of the composition. This technique, used in some of his most iconic works—including his Marilyn portraits—transforms the image into something resembling a photographic negative. Highlights become shadows, and formerly receding areas surge forward in bold, emphatic form. The effect is both dramatic and disorienting, charging the image with intensified visual energy.
Ultimately, Be a Somebody with a Body stands as one of the most incisive works of Warhol’s late period. Borrowing the blunt rhetoric of mass advertising, it probes the cultural obsession with physical perfection, masculine idealization, and the commodification of identity itself. By elevating a disposable slogan into a monumental artwork, Warhol exposes both the allure and the absurdity of the pressures embedded in consumer culture. The painting is at once humorous, critical, and unmistakably Warhol—transforming an ordinary piece of advertising into a potent reflection of the desires and anxieties of its era.
