Andy Warhol

"We would ask them to pose for 'a friend' for $50 an hour. The next day, they'd appear at the Factory and Andy, whom we never introduced by name, would take their Polaroids. And the next time we saw them at the Gilded Grape, they invariably would say, "Tell your friend I do a lot more for fifty bucks"."   -Bob Colacello

The present work from Andy Warhol's celebrated series, Ladies and Gentlemen, in which drag queens are immortalized in stunning hues through the Warholian touch of the silkscreen, is a stellar representation exhibiting vibrant colour and rich, lavish surface texture.  The bold shapes of the segmented colours, jump out at the viewer, with the electric blue streak acting as a jolting thunderbolt down the centre of the composition.  The creamy mauve backdrop is a subtle setting for which to place his androgynous figure, who emerges in a striking coat of bright magenta.  In these portraits, Warhol compartmentalizes his colour, creating large geometric sections of strong, flat colour.  His model gazes out from against this painterly ground in a playful pose, her chin resting tenderly on her hand and gazing seductively from out under her long, dark eyelashes, with a playful smile toying on her lips.  Her dramatic make-up and strong features further create a sense of glamour and intrigue.  The swirling pools of paint on the surface and sumptuous texture add another dimension to Warhol's otherwise perfectly flat paintings and add heightened, expressive drama not often seen before.

The Ladies and Gentlemen paintings are among Warhol's most abstract portraits.  A general feature these works share is the sweeping zones of intense, clashing colour as evident in the present work.  The figure-ground relation is pushed to new extremes and the dissonance between silk-screened and painted ground implies a further abstraction of the self.  These glamorous portraits sought to create an illusion of the celebrity.  Yet, they are far from Warhol's earlier iconic Jackie or Marilyn portraits.  In Ladies and Gentlemen, the sitters' striking poses, wild clothing and lavish make-up and accessories immediately elevate their status from drag queen to icon.  In true Warhol fashion, he believed anyone could become a star.  Warhol's ladies and gentleman pictured have no proper names.  In the absence of specific names, they remain nobodies.  Attaining fame necessarily involves making a name for oneself, and these sitters will never be stars. Instead these ladies and gentlemen represent the abstract notion of celebrity. 

Andy first begun the Ladies and Gentlemen series in 1975 and would explore this theme over the course of the next year.  It was the first major thematic group of works based on his use of Polaroid photographs.  Unlike his portraits from the 1960s, Warhol's portraits of the 1970s and 80s were made primarily using photographs he had taken himself and reveal his first experimentations with the Polaroid camera.  A perfect vehicle for capturing his parading circus of Factory groupies, celebrities and socialites, these snap-shots allowed Warhol to capture the hundreds of expressions, gestures and moments he sought to reveal in his subjects.

As Warhol's clever title implies, these subjects are ladies in terms of gender and gentlemen in terms of sex.  His sitters in this series consisted of drag queens and transvestites who had been prominent in his Factory crowd and were featured in many of his films.  As Vincent Fremont reflects, "Even though Andy's portrait sittings were relatively short in the classic sense, I think most people came away from the sittings interested in Andy, the artist. He made it exciting and special to pose for him. When Andy was working on a series of paintings entitled "Ladies and Gentlemen," a number of transvestites were invited up to the studio to be photographed.  Bob Colacello found most of them at a club called The Gilded Grape. After the photo session, I would hand the subjects a check and send them over to the bank. Usually they would not have any identification, so the bank would call me and ask if I knew a Helen or a Harry Morales! I do not remember if they knew who Andy was, but the photo sessions were wonderful for every one of them. They were able to do their favorite poses and act glamorous for Andy's camera."