Andy Warhol

Jed Johnson, New York (acquired from the artist in 1978)
Jay Johnson and Tom Cashin, New York (acquired from the above in 1996)
Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich (acquired from the above in 2010)
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2010

Milan, Triennale di Milano, The Andy Warhol Show, September 2004 – January 2005, cat. no. 191, p. 255, illustrated in color

The work is in excellent condition. Close inspection shows very slight wear at the tips of the corners. There are extremely faint and intermittent stretcher bar impressions at ¼ inch in from the edge. Under ultraviolet light, there are no apparent restorations The canvas is framed in a wood frame, painted black, with a small float.
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For Andy Warhol, the aspiration toward glamour meant the world. Relentlessly attracted to the superstar luster that fluoresced through the printed picture, Warhol fundamentally strove to capture the manufacturing of celebrity and the performance of identity cardinal to the wholesale realization of beauty. Brilliantly citing his earlier iconic silkscreened portraits of Liz, Jackie, and Marilyn, pictures that radiate the allure of a highly constructed ideal, Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen from 1976 arrestingly captures the visage of a nameless unknown drag queen with the same penetrating examination into public persona that he reserved for the most quintessential grandes-dames of glamour. Warhol observed: “Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood. They perform a documentary service, usually consecrating their lives to keeping the glittering alternative alive and available for (not-too-close) inspection.” (Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 1975, New York, p. 54) Striking in scale and vibrant with bold color, the present work is singular in the sumptuous painterly detail of its surface. One of the largest single portraits on canvas from the Ladies and Gentlemen series, the painting is exemplary of Warhol’s most pictorially electric portraits, while its subject magnifies the incisive conceptual undercurrent that has cemented the artist as the sharpest cultural observer of the Twentieth Century.

Like many of Warhol’s most renowned series, the genesis of the Ladies and Gentlemen - first commissioned in 1975 by Warhol’s Turin-based dealer, Luciano Anselmino - has become legend. Warhol’s friend and the future editor of Interview magazine, Bob Colacello, made repeated trips to The Gilded Grape at 8^th Avenue and West 45^th Street in Hell’s Kitchen, recruiting primarily black and Hispanic drag queens to pose for Polaroids back at the studio. Dolled up and carefully modeled before Warhol’s watchful lens for a scant fee of fifty dollars, the anonymous transvestites fashioned themselves after iconic chanteuses ranging from Diana Ross to Lena Horne. Vincent Fremont recalled, “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.” Warhol notably turned away from more established gender-bending Factory staples like Candy Darling, Ondine, and Holly Woodlawn, former stars of famous Warhol films such as 1966’s Chelsea Girls and 1972’s Women in Revolt. Instead, he focused the eye of his camera on unknowns who possessed the untainted ambition of ingénues. Warhol mused: “I’m fascinated by boys who spend their lives trying to be complete girls, because they have to work so hard—double-time—getting rid of all the tell-tale male signs and drawing in all the female signs… It’s hard work to look like the complete opposite of what nature made you and then to be an imitation woman of what was only a fantasy woman in the first place.” (Ibid., p. 54)

Unlike the thin translucency of the majority of Warhol’s earlier silkscreens, the surface of the present work is thickly painted in lush sweeps of gestural brushstrokes, evocative of his earlier hand-painted pictures. Vibrant swathes of blue and pink color the image screened from Warhol’s initial Polaroid, leaving dense impasto that abstractly emphasizes the mask worn by drag queens to adopt their feminine personas. This formal exaggeration mirrors the artifice of the larger than life subjects who costume themselves in stereotypical signs of feminine beauty. The expressionistic ribbons of pigment contouring the figure's eye and lips recall the drag queen's embellished make-up, conceptually advancing Warhol’s treatment of paint beyond its basic capacity as a representational mechanism. Emanating a stately grace that successfully conceals her true biology as a man, the artist’s subject seductively grasps at her collar and rests her chin in her elegantly flexed fingers to conjure refinement and class. Warhol was drawn to drag culture for its embodiment of gender performance, and the work’s title explicitly draws attention to the figure's dual sexual identity. However, any visual clues that would alert to this cross-dressing are subsumed behind the magnetic screen of fantasy. Under Warhol’s admiring gaze, his models morphed into the perfect iterations of Liz, Jackie, and Marilyn that they molded themselves after, and achieved the fifteen minutes of fame that Warhol famously believed we were all destined for.