Many of them would spend their entire lives in precarious conditions. If the models, however, were hoping for “Factory surplus value” for their efforts, this hope was not fulfilled. It was the anonymity of the sitters that made “Ladies and Gentlemen” a particularly lucrative deal for Warhol. It eventually comprised 268 paintings, about 65 drawings and collages, and an edition of 10 prints.
#ANDY WARHOL GAY SEX ART SERIES#
Yet this calculation is not even close to complete: among all the series in Warhol’s oeuvre, “Ladies and Gentlemen” ranks as one of the most extensive.
![andy warhol gay sex art andy warhol gay sex art](https://www.lavanguardia.com/files/content_image_mobile_filter/uploads/2020/04/14/5f15f09165cc4.jpeg)
![andy warhol gay sex art andy warhol gay sex art](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/andy-warhol-secret-life.jpg)
By way of comparison: with the entire commission of 105 pictures, Warhol earned around 1,000,000 dollars, which means that he gave the models a share in his income of around 0.01% each. Depending on the length of their session, he paid the 14 sitters a one-time fee of either 50 or 100 dollars. In order to keep the fees of the persons cast somewhat under control, Warhol asked his assistants to leave his name unmentioned to the potential models. Warhol then commissioned three of his assistants–whom he handen $ 75 each–to recruit drag queens and transwomen himself did not know. On the one hand, because Candy Darling had died at the beginning of the same year, and on the other, because he was annoyed by Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn wanting a share of the profits he made using their images. Warhol, on the other hand, could not or did not like to work with the trans celebrities from the Factory. Yet neither the Warhol “superstars” nor his earlier works, such as the Brillo boxes, had managed to do without a (brand) name-whether as a subject or in the title of the work. Oddly enough, Anselmino believed that such a form of anonymity was in keeping with Warhol’s original work ethic. Anselmino and Warhol had different motivations for choosing allegedly fameless drag queens and transwomen (they used the now uncommon term “transvestite”). Its title, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” with its associations of the theater and show business, also originated from Anselmino. In 1974, the art dealer Luciano Anselmino from Turin commissioned Warhol with this series. Installation view, Andy Warhol Now, Museum Ludwig, Cologne 2020, © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, Cologne/ Marleen Scholten.
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They articulate structural discrimination within the art world as well as racism within the queer scene. Such contradictions are repeated at all stages of the development of “Ladies and Gentlemen,” from the creation of the series to its circulation and on to its reappraisal in museums after Warhol’s death. While Warhol claims to have had a friendship with the sitters, he simultaneously anonymizes them. They are not even mentioned in the titles of Warhols’s paintings of them, unlike was the case, for example, with the Marilyn Monroe series (although in that case the fame of the person portrayed would presumably have made redundant any particular titling).
![andy warhol gay sex art andy warhol gay sex art](https://www.phaidon.com/resource/haringanddubose.jpg)
Warhol portrays the sitters like Hollywood icons, but withholds their names. Ligon casts doubts on the truth of this statement and is confirmed by the comprehensive catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s works. As Warhol told the journalists present, he frequently met the persons portrayed in New York they were his friends, he said. Warhol mounted their Polaroid photographs as silkscreens and additionally hand-painted these enlarged photos with richly luminous, sometimes thickly applied colors. The persons portrayed are either African-Americans or People of Color from Lower Manhattan. All of the 105 works exhibited there-some of them large-format-show portraits of 14 different drag queens or transwomen. It is 1975, and Warhol is opening his exhibition “Ladies and Gentlemen” in the Palazzo dei Diamanti.