Ladies and Gentlemen

‘Among other things, drag queens are living testimony to the way women used to want to be, the way some people still want them to be, and the way some women still actually want to be. 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’ (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), New York 1975, p. 54).


‘Drag queens are reminders that some stars still aren’t just like you and me... real girls we knew couldn’t seem to get excited about anything, and the drag queens could get excited about anything’ (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), New York 1975, p. 55).


Andy Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen at once exudes glamour and parodies the celebrity aura embodied in his famous portraits of the 1960s. Proudly posed, the drag queen’s vibrant features jump off the dark surface of the canvas with immediate intensity. Rendered in gestured swathes of acrylic paint, Warhol mirrors the vibrant characters and glamorous makeup of his sitter, marking out her skin, lips, and eyes with broad sweeps of rich brown, electric blue, and shocking red. Transcending notions of masculinity and femininity, kitsch and stardom, Warhol’s treatment of his sitter is bestowed the same reverence and anonymity as his best loved celebrity portraits.

Turning his attention to the drag queens of New York City’s party scene, Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen is rooted in the legacy of his iconic paintings of female stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor - figures held up as the epitome of beauty and glamour in our culture. As Warhol philosophized, ‘among other things, drag queens are living testimony to the way women used to want to be, the way some people still want them to be, and the way some women still actually want to be. 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’ (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), New York 1975, p. 54).

For such pictures as his Marilyn and Liz, Warhol had adapted ready-made publicity images that, through his cropping and silkscreening, took on a seriality and repetition which conveyed a sense of distance or removal from the viewer. By contrast, in Ladies and Gentlemen, Warhol used the same technical approach as in his commissioned portraits of Hollywood celebrities by taking Polaroid shots of his subjects. Bob Colacello, the future editor of Warhol’s Interview magazine recalls the conception of the series in 1975: ‘I found most of the models at 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, 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!’ (B. Colacello, 'Holy Terror', Andy Warhol Close Up, New York 1990, p. 228). This proximity to his sitters allowed him a more nuanced degree of creative control, which in this case, he channeled into photographs from the neck up and in three-quarter angle, also having the drag queens ‘vogue’ in a variety of expressions from femme-fatale to coquette. After enlarging the images for the silkscreening process Warhol prepared his canvases with bold colour blocks to echo the contours of their visage. By treating these drag queens with the same sort of impersonal distance that he approaches all his subjects, Warhol presents their aspiration for beauty and glamour without judgment. ‘Drag queens are reminders that some stars still aren’t just like you and me’ and they too can strive for the glamour and beauty epitomized by Marilyn and Liz - everyone can have their fifteen minutes of fame’ (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), New York 1975, p. 55).

Having an abiding interest in drag culture, Warhol embarked on his own series of Polaroid self-portraits dressed in drag in 1981 which was a direct reference to Man Ray’s 1920s portrait of Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy. Man Ray was a prominent figure throughout Warhol’s career, whom the artist photographed in 1973. Man Ray’s Turin-based art dealer Luciano Anselmino subsequently commissioned these into a 100 edition print. It was when Warhol went to Italy to sign these works that Anselmino commissioned another larger series of works which resulted in the Ladies and Gentlemen series.

Although Warhol’s social circle at ‘The Factory’ from the early 1960s included drag queens such as Candy Darling and Ondine whom he had used for female roles in several of his films including most famously Chelsea Girls of 1966 and Women Revolt of 1972, for this project Warhol was not looking for stars but for wannabes - those ‘drag queens [who] could get excited about anything’ (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), New York 1975, p. 55).