Andy Warhol

Private Collection, Tokyo
Binoche, Tokyo, November 30, 1989, lot 3
Private Collection, New York
Sotheby's, London, February 5, 2004, lot 52
Private Collection, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Ferrara, Piazza dei Diamanti, Andy Warhol: Ladies and Gentlemen, 1975, p. 99, illustrated in color
Venice, Abbazia di San Gregorio, Andy Warhol in Venice, 1998, cat. no. 15,  pp. 38 and 79 (installation view), illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of wear and handling around the edges and corners, with fine craquelure at the pull margins and small losses at the corner tips. There are some scattered fine cracks located along the sides in the upper half of the painting. There are three small white accretions located in the bottom half of the painting. The ½ inch unpainted spot, located to the left of the figure's head appears to be inherent to the work and a result of the silkscreen process. There is no evidence of retouching or restoration under Ultraviolet light inspection. Framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

"Drag Queens are reminders that some stars still aren't like you and me. … real girls we knew couldn't seem to get excited about anything, and the drag queens could get excited about everything." - Andy Warhol (From, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), New York, Harcourt Brace, 1977, p. 55.)

Andy Warhol achieved a number of milestones that made his work resonate outside the art world, and perhaps primary amongst them was work that depicted aspects of society it was unwilling or incapable of recognizing. In 1975, he produced a series of portraits of anonymous transvestites with the cheeky title Ladies and Gentlemen. That year, New York City was on the verge of fiscal collapse and the President’s sentiment was captured in the headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” (The Daily News, Oct. 30, 1975, p. A1) Amidst this turmoil, the downtown gay culture thrived despite being ghettoized and ignored by the rest of the city.

The series, which was never exhibited in the United States during Warhol’s lifetime, bears striking structural and compositional similarities to his celebrity portraiture. However, it was the choice of models for the Ladies & Gentlemen series that made the works so subversive and original. Rather than select readily available drag queens who hung around the Factory, Warhol's assistants approached potential candidates at the infamous Gilded Grape nightclub, which had become a magnet for transvestites who held nightly “conventions in front of their shrine.” (Orde Coombs, "Le Freak C'est Chic on 45th Street," New York Magazine, January 8, 1979, p. 47) The assistants offered the unsuspecting drag queens $50 to “pose for a friend.” When they arrived at the Factory, Warhol had them pose while he photographed them with his preferred Polaroid “Big Shot” camera. Regardless of their marginalized status, Warhol treated these visitors like his celebrity sitters. Pier Paolo Pasolini, writing in 1975, noted that the images were akin to glamour shots, “the photograph always seems to be obsessively the same, always from the front or from the three-quarter view, never in profile; always 'posed', never from life.”

In the present work, Warhol's process for applying the paint mirrored the sitter's overdetermined cosmetic construction of sexual identity. Warhol quickly poured on layers of paint and then adjusted borders with his fingers. The lowest stratum of Alice blue is revealed around the eyes upon which he applied a field of steel blue. Broad splashes of chocolate brown, crimson, and minty green followed, crisscrossing regions and with ripples frozen in time. Using a heavy finger stroke, Warhol created rough delineations where the colors overlapped, for example, to reinforce the edge of her nose, lips and jaw. The present example’s elaborations, perhaps more than any other work in the Ladies and Gentlemen series, reveal Warhol's painterly sensibilities, which he typically held in abeyance. Indeed, the gestural strokes almost belie his pre-1970s oeuvre of mechanically-produced silkscreen paintings that bore almost no record of the artist's hand. With this series, Warhol mirrors the painterly techniques of his artistic predecessors, the Abstract Expressionists, yet mocks their exalted abstract canvases with his taboo choice of model.

Many figures in the series appear joyful and unguarded, while others, such the present example, appear pensive and project a feeling of subdued tragedy. With her carefully shaped bouffant wig and heavy make-up, she stares towards an off-camera distraction; she is caught between poses with a cigarette as her only defense. Her pose recalls Warhol's earlier Screen Test series where unremitting sessions in front of stationary video cameras invariably led the subjects to seek relief from off camera stimuli. Psychologically stripped bare before the camera, Warhol noted that it required “people who can turn themselves on in front of the camera ... It's much harder ... to be your own script.” (Letitia Kent, "Andy Warhol, Movieman: It's Hard to Be Your Own Script" 1970).

Sitters trained in constructing and maintaining a coherent exterior identity, primarily actors and transvestites, fared best in front of the relentless camera. Like many of the Screen Test sitters, the drag queens in Ladies and Gentlemen are “their own script” both at level of their fashioned sexual identities, and through well-rehearsed posing. Even Warhol himself experimented with cross-dressing in the 1970s and 1980s. In a series of Polaroids, Warhol applied layers of eye make up and lipstick, and often wigs, to disguise himself as a woman for a photo shoot.

For Warhol and his circle, transvestism was their day-to-day reality, but for 1975 New Yorkers, drag queens were an unacknowledged challenge to traditional gender roles. Psychoanalytically this phenomenon, frequently discussed with respect to Warhols Death and Destruction images, is trauma, "a missed encounter with the real," that is unreadable consciously. It is recognized only through commemorative repetition, not its direct representation. In 1963, Warhol summarized the effect of these works’ “traumatic realism,” “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect.” (G.R. Swenson, "What Is Pop Art?," ARTnews, November 1963). With Ladies and Gentlemen, Warhol has added the dissolving of sexual boundaries to his previous traumatic images of death, pain, sorrow and conflict.