Ladies
And Gentlemen

The Ladies and Gentlemen collection showcases the essence of Warhol’s Pop Art aesthetic which is characterised by his use of bright and bold colours and graphic lines. Many of the portraits are overlain with blocks of vivid colours which bring a sense of joy and flamboyance to the portraits. The deliberately misaligned layers of colour spill beyond the lines of the photographic screen prints which works to capture the theatricality of drag and gender performance that Warhol was trying to explore.

Warhol was not a stranger to portraiture and produced many portraits of famous sitters, from celebrities to important historical figures. The anonymity of the subjects in Ladies ands Gentlemen marks a departure from his earlier works in which the name of the famous celebrity, such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor was a crucial element of the work and its attraction. Despite their anonymity, each model in Ladies and Gentlemen is striking and unique.

Fascinated by the idea of fame throughout his career, Warhol was also intrigued by the way that identity is performed through images. Working with sitters who were transgender, drag queens, and gender non-conforming gave Warhol the opportunity to explore the complexities of identity and gender. By enlarging these portraits and bringing them into the realm of fine art, Warhol challenges traditional notions of beauty and gender, showing that everyone can be beautiful.

The Ladies and Gentlemen collection is a controversial body of work. Warhol has been criticised for the way in which the sitters had little agency over how they were portrayed and where their portraits would be displayed. Defenders of the works, however, claim that Warhol would sit with the models after taking their photos to agree on their favourite images which he would then use as the base of the prints.

Warhol has also been criticised for not paying his models sufficiently. Warhol allegedly paid each model $50, a small sum when the huge amounts Warhol would earn from selling the prints are taken into account. In an interview from 1979, one of Warhol’s sitters, Marsha P. Johnson pointed to the absurdity of her portrait being on sale for thousands of dollars, whilst she struggled to pay rent.

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