Andy Warhol
Ladies and Gentlemen
1975
Scroll
Andy Warhol
Ladies and Gentlemen
1975
Physical Qualities
Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas, 50 x 42 in. (127 x 106.7 cm.)
Credit Line
Purchase with funds provided by Laura R. Burrows, Baltimore; and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Object Number
1994.23
In 1974, Italian art dealer Luciano Anselmino commissioned Andy Warhol to create a series of silkscreens of trans women and drag queens that took a playful and theatrical title: Ladies and Gentlemen. Unlike Warhol’s earlier paintings that delved into celebrity and socialite culture, this series began from nearly 500 Polaroids of 14 sitters, all hailing from queer Black and Latinx communities in New York, to which Warhol was an outsider. The source image for this work is an elegant Polaroid of Wilhelmina Ross. Warhol transforms her demure face with paint, applying garish colors and exaggerated brushstrokes that almost anonymize Ross. Ladies and Gentlemen raises important questions around the possibility of agency and self-representation in how some of society’s most vulnerable are pictured.
The Baltimore Museum of Art by purchase and partial gift, 1994; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.; Estate of Andy Warhol
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, "Warhol & Mapplethorpe: Guise and Dolls," October 17, 2015-January 24, 2016.
John Dorsey, "BMA acquires 18 Warhols," "The Sun," Baltimore, Maryland, May 5, 1994, pp. 1A, 25A, ill. p. 1A.
Inscribed: FACE: clean. VERSO: BLC and URC, (black stamp), 'THE ESTATE/OF/ANDY WARHOL(encircled)': (black ink), 'PA 35.108' at 4 places: BL of canvas, UL on horizontal top stretcher, UR of canvas, and upside down on center horizontal stretcher at R.
