Ladies and Gentlemen

In 1975 Bob Colacello, the future publisher of the US American magazine, "Interview", cast drag queens in the New York club, "The Gilded Grap". They were to model for a friend for fifty dollars. Of course, he refrained from mentioning at the casting that the friend in question was Andy Warhol. The work "Ladies and Gentlemen", made in 1975, belongs to the series of the same name which consists of paintings, drawings and prints. In contrast to Andy Warhol’s earlier portraits, this is the first series in which Warhol used his own photographs as the starting point. They were all taken with a Polaroid Big Shot camera which the artist bought in the 1970s. The painting shows drag queen Wilhelmina Ross who smiles at us dressed as Josephine Baker. Here Warhol proceeds in a painterly way he had never used in previous works. He did not just apply monochromatic surfaces to the canvas in order to overprint them with portraits of the drag queens. Instead, he employs color areas that make the pictures more sensual and emphasize parts of the face and body. After the "Ladies and Gentlemen" series this new painterly moment was to become a trade mark of Warhol’s late work. In addition, in this portrait series Andy Warhol plays with the ambiguity of the title "Ladies and Gentlemen". While it is true that under their make-up drag queens are men, the wigs, earrings and lipstick reveal their real female essence and identity. The drag queens take an important place in Warhol’s oeuvre as a whole: “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.”