Ladies And Gentlemen (F. & S. II.137)
Ladies And Gentlemen (F. & S. II.137)
Signed Print
Andy Warhol
£5,500-£8,500Value Indicator
$11,500-$18,000 Value Indicator
$10,000-$16,000 Value Indicator
¥50,000-¥80,000 Value Indicator
€6,500-€10,000 Value Indicator
$60,000-$90,000 Value Indicator
¥1,090,000-¥1,690,000 Value Indicator
$7,500-$11,500 Value Indicator
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110 x 72cm, Edition of 125, Screenprint
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Meaning & Analysis
Ladies & Gentlemen (F. & S. II.137) is a print from Andy Warhol’s large portfolio of work the Ladies & Gentlemen series from 1975. This portrait depicts a transgender woman who went by the name Broadway, of whom Warhol created 19 paintings from an original selection of 47 Polaroids. Broadway signed one of her Polaroids, but very little information is known about her.
The Italian art dealer Luciano Anselmino who commissioned Warhol to complete the series, stipulated that he wanted the portraits to feature New York drag queens, but suggested that it was to be ‘impersonal’ and ‘anonymous’. The commission also specified that the models were not to be drag queens who resembled beautiful cisgender women, nor did he want them to be higher profile members of the drag community. The names and identities of the models therefore remained anonymous until 2014, when the Warhol Foundation published an official list of all the Ladies and Gentlemen paintings.
Despite their anonymity, each model in Ladies & Gentlemen is striking and unique. Warhol’s print of Broadway is overlain with blocks of vivid colour to bring a sense of joy and flamboyance to the portrait. The deliberately misaligned layers of colour that spill beyond the lines of the photographic screen print, adeptly capture the theatricality of drag and gender performance that Warhol was trying to explore.
Andy Warhol was a leading figure of the Pop Art movement and is often considered the father of Pop Art. Born in 1928, Warhol allowed cultural references of the 20th century to drive his work. From the depiction of glamorous public figures, such as Marilyn Monroe, to the everyday Campbell’s Soup Can, the artist challenged what was considered art by blurring the boundaries between high art and mass consumerism. Warhol's preferred screen printing technique further reiterated his obsession with mass culture, enabling art to be seen as somewhat of a commodity through the reproduced images in multiple colour ways.
