Mark of the Beast (Positive), c. 1985-86

Narrator: Returning to a practice he’d largely abandoned in the 1960s, Warhol based the paintings you see on this wall on advertisements. But these works are more overtly political, alluding to gentrification, the Cold War, and AIDS. Some of the paintings refer to HIV tests. One pictures a hand marked with the numbers “666,” over the phrase “The Mark of the Beast.” Warhol subtitled this work Positive, and another one Negative. That one shows a star radiating out from a figure’s forehead, beneath the words “Are you ‘different?’” In these works, Warhol responds to the extreme homophobia that marked early responses to AIDS. Jessica Beck is the Milton Fine Curator of Art at The Andy Warhol Museum.

Jessica Beck: The discourse had gotten so negative that it became a moment in which people were suggesting that homosexual men should be tattooed if they were positive for HIV and AIDS. So an image like The Mark of the Beast points to that discourse. It also points to the symptoms of the disease, the sarcoma that would accompany the disease.