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Lot Essay
Ladies and Gentlemen is an astute examination of the nature of celebrity and glamour, as Andy Warhol combines the heady atmosphere of the 1970s New York club scene with a sharp critique on our obsession with fame and fortune.
Inspired by his own legacy of iconic paintings of female celebrities including Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor (figures held up by our culture as the epitome of beauty and glamor), in this series Warhol turned to the Hispanic and African American drag queens that populated the underground bars and clubs of New York. “Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal movie star womanhood,” he once said. “They perform a documentary service, usually consecrating their lives to keeping the glittering alternative alive and available for (not-too-close) inspection” (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), New York 1975, p. 54).
Ladies and Gentlemen also shows the artist working with seriality and the repetition of a single image to dramatic effect, the sitter’s coquettish visage appearing in triplicate across the canvases, seemingly caught in mid-conversation. Playing with notions of masculinity and femininity, kitsch and stardom, Warhol’s treatment of his sitter bestows the same mix of reverence and irony as his best loved celebrity portraits.
Proudly posed, the subject’s vibrant features leap off the dark surface of the painting with immediate intensity, her gaze directly engaging the viewer. Rendered in classic Warholian silkscreen and gestural sweeps of acrylic paint, the artist mirrors on canvas the vibrant character and glamorous makeup of his sitter, highlighting her skin, lips, and eyes with broad fields of burnished brown, turquoise, mint green and glowing orange.
Although Warhol’s circle at The Factory throughout the 1960s included drag queens such as Candy Darling and Ondine, whom he had used for female roles in several of his films, for this project Warhol was not looking for established stars but for “wannabes,” those “drag queens [who] could get excited about anything,” as he put it (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), New York 1975, p. 55).
Bob Colacello, who would become editor of Warhol’s Interview magazine, recalls the conception of the series: “I found most of the models at the [midtown New York City nightclub] the Gilded Grape. We would ask them to pose for “a friend” for $50 per half hour. The next day, they’d appear at the Factory and Andy…would take their Polaroids” (B. Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, New York 1990, p. 228).
Unlike his early ‘60s paintings of Hollywood celebrities, which made use of existing publicity stills that conveyed a sense of distance from the viewer, Warhol took the Polaroid photographs for this series himself, the proximity to his sitters affording him a greater degree of creative control as he composed the photos from the neck up and in three-quarter angle, asking the drag queens to “vogue” in a variety of expressions from femme fatale to coquette. Warhol skillfully managed the photo sessions so as to make the sitters feel glamorous and special, and to bring out their best poses.
After enlarging the images for the silk screening process, Warhol prepared his canvases with bold blocks of color to echo the contours of their face and clothes. By treating these drag queens with the same impersonal distance that he approaches all his subjects, Warhol presents their aspiration for beauty and glamour without judgment. In the photos Warhol created for this series, he captured a tension between the artifice of the gender façade and the earnest expression of the sitter, which belies an underlying vulnerability.
The genesis of the Ladies and Gentlemen series lay in Warhol’s own longstanding interest in drag culture, and his enthusiasm for the work of avant-garde photographer Man Ray. Warhol himself dressed in drag for his own series of Polaroid self-portraits in 1981. The images were homage to Man Ray’s 1920s portrait of Marcel Duchamp as his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy.
Bold and glamorous, the sitters for Andy Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen exist in a unique category of the artist’s famed silkscreen portraits. Neither famous celebrities nor wealthy socialite patrons, they differ from the artist’s previous subjects in that they are complete strangers, all found by his assistants in local hangouts and paid a small modeling fee to pose for the artist. Yet, they are perhaps the most intimate of all his portraits, evoking glamor as well as embodying the art of disguise, they struck a chord with the Warhol and remain one of the most unique and poignant series within the artist’s oeuvre
Inspired by his own legacy of iconic paintings of female celebrities including Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor (figures held up by our culture as the epitome of beauty and glamor), in this series Warhol turned to the Hispanic and African American drag queens that populated the underground bars and clubs of New York. “Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal movie star womanhood,” he once said. “They perform a documentary service, usually consecrating their lives to keeping the glittering alternative alive and available for (not-too-close) inspection” (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), New York 1975, p. 54).
Ladies and Gentlemen also shows the artist working with seriality and the repetition of a single image to dramatic effect, the sitter’s coquettish visage appearing in triplicate across the canvases, seemingly caught in mid-conversation. Playing with notions of masculinity and femininity, kitsch and stardom, Warhol’s treatment of his sitter bestows the same mix of reverence and irony as his best loved celebrity portraits.
Proudly posed, the subject’s vibrant features leap off the dark surface of the painting with immediate intensity, her gaze directly engaging the viewer. Rendered in classic Warholian silkscreen and gestural sweeps of acrylic paint, the artist mirrors on canvas the vibrant character and glamorous makeup of his sitter, highlighting her skin, lips, and eyes with broad fields of burnished brown, turquoise, mint green and glowing orange.
Although Warhol’s circle at The Factory throughout the 1960s included drag queens such as Candy Darling and Ondine, whom he had used for female roles in several of his films, for this project Warhol was not looking for established stars but for “wannabes,” those “drag queens [who] could get excited about anything,” as he put it (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), New York 1975, p. 55).
Bob Colacello, who would become editor of Warhol’s Interview magazine, recalls the conception of the series: “I found most of the models at the [midtown New York City nightclub] the Gilded Grape. We would ask them to pose for “a friend” for $50 per half hour. The next day, they’d appear at the Factory and Andy…would take their Polaroids” (B. Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, New York 1990, p. 228).
Unlike his early ‘60s paintings of Hollywood celebrities, which made use of existing publicity stills that conveyed a sense of distance from the viewer, Warhol took the Polaroid photographs for this series himself, the proximity to his sitters affording him a greater degree of creative control as he composed the photos from the neck up and in three-quarter angle, asking the drag queens to “vogue” in a variety of expressions from femme fatale to coquette. Warhol skillfully managed the photo sessions so as to make the sitters feel glamorous and special, and to bring out their best poses.
After enlarging the images for the silk screening process, Warhol prepared his canvases with bold blocks of color to echo the contours of their face and clothes. By treating these drag queens with the same impersonal distance that he approaches all his subjects, Warhol presents their aspiration for beauty and glamour without judgment. In the photos Warhol created for this series, he captured a tension between the artifice of the gender façade and the earnest expression of the sitter, which belies an underlying vulnerability.
The genesis of the Ladies and Gentlemen series lay in Warhol’s own longstanding interest in drag culture, and his enthusiasm for the work of avant-garde photographer Man Ray. Warhol himself dressed in drag for his own series of Polaroid self-portraits in 1981. The images were homage to Man Ray’s 1920s portrait of Marcel Duchamp as his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy.
Bold and glamorous, the sitters for Andy Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen exist in a unique category of the artist’s famed silkscreen portraits. Neither famous celebrities nor wealthy socialite patrons, they differ from the artist’s previous subjects in that they are complete strangers, all found by his assistants in local hangouts and paid a small modeling fee to pose for the artist. Yet, they are perhaps the most intimate of all his portraits, evoking glamor as well as embodying the art of disguise, they struck a chord with the Warhol and remain one of the most unique and poignant series within the artist’s oeuvre