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拍品專文
Inspired by his own legacy of iconic paintings of female celebrities including Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, Warhol turns to the Hispanic and African American drag queens that populated the underground bars and clubs of New York for his Ladies and Gentleman series. The result is an astute examination of the nature of celebrity and glamour, as Andy Warhol combines the heady atmosphere of the 1970s New York club scene with a sharp critique on our obsession with fame and fortune.
Rendered in classic Warholian silkscreen and gestural sweeps of acrylic paint, the artist mirrors on canvas the vibrant character and glamorous makeup of his sitters. Playing with notions of masculinity and femininity, kitsch and stardom, Warhol’s treatment of his sitters bestows the same mix of reverence and irony as his best loved celebrity portraits. Unlike his early 1960s paintings of Hollywood celebrities, which made use of existing publicity stills that conveyed a sense of distance from the viewer, Warhol took the Polaroid photographs for this series himself, the proximity to his sitters affording him a greater degree of creative control as he composed the photos from the neck up and in three-quarter angle, asking the drag queens to “vogue” in a variety of expressions from femme fatale to coquette. Warhol skillfully managed the photo sessions so as to make the sitters feel glamorous and special, and to bring out their best poses. “Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal movie star womanhood,” he once said. “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).
Bold and glamorous, the sitters for Andy Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen exist in a unique category of the artist’s famed silkscreen portraits. Neither famous celebrities nor wealthy socialite patrons, they differ from the artist’s previous subjects in that they are complete strangers, all found by his assistants in local hangouts and paid a small modeling fee to pose for the artist. Yet, they are perhaps the most intimate of all his portraits, evoking glamor as well as embodying the art of disguise, they struck a chord with the Warhol and remain one of the most unique and poignant series within the artist’s oeuvre.
Rendered in classic Warholian silkscreen and gestural sweeps of acrylic paint, the artist mirrors on canvas the vibrant character and glamorous makeup of his sitters. Playing with notions of masculinity and femininity, kitsch and stardom, Warhol’s treatment of his sitters bestows the same mix of reverence and irony as his best loved celebrity portraits. Unlike his early 1960s paintings of Hollywood celebrities, which made use of existing publicity stills that conveyed a sense of distance from the viewer, Warhol took the Polaroid photographs for this series himself, the proximity to his sitters affording him a greater degree of creative control as he composed the photos from the neck up and in three-quarter angle, asking the drag queens to “vogue” in a variety of expressions from femme fatale to coquette. Warhol skillfully managed the photo sessions so as to make the sitters feel glamorous and special, and to bring out their best poses. “Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal movie star womanhood,” he once said. “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).
Bold and glamorous, the sitters for Andy Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen exist in a unique category of the artist’s famed silkscreen portraits. Neither famous celebrities nor wealthy socialite patrons, they differ from the artist’s previous subjects in that they are complete strangers, all found by his assistants in local hangouts and paid a small modeling fee to pose for the artist. Yet, they are perhaps the most intimate of all his portraits, evoking glamor as well as embodying the art of disguise, they struck a chord with the Warhol and remain one of the most unique and poignant series within the artist’s oeuvre.