Lot 148 D

"Andy Warhol was fascinated by the famous. Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley are among the many celebrities who feature in his work.
But the people in his Ladies and Gentlemen series are not so well known. For decades they were unlabelled and anonymous. It took until 2014 for researchers to uncover their names and identities – and we still know very little about many of them.
Warhol was commissioned to make the series by an Italian art dealer called Luciano Anselmino, who suggested a series of ‘impersonal, anonymous’ pictures of ‘transvestites’ and came up with the theatrical title ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’.[...] Ross appears to have been Warhol´s favourite model for Ladies and Gentlemen. He made 73 paintings, based on seven Polaroids, 29 drawings, and five collage portraits of Ross. He also created five giant 10-foot canvases of her. Ross was born Douglas Mitchell Hunter in Kansas City, Missouri, moving to New York in 1970. Her name was a mix of the model agency Wilhelmina and Warhol´s close friend Diana Ross. After Jimmy Camicia saw her in an off-off Broadway production, where she was pretending to be a cockroach, he asked her to join his drag theatre company. She soon became a leading star and worked with them around the time Warhol made her portrait. At the end of 1974 Ross moved to Puerto Rico in 1974, where she lived for ten years. When she learned she had AIDS, she returned home to her mother where she was nursed for the last two years of her life." (Ladies and Gentlemen, Meet the people who posed for Andy Warhol’s portrait series of trans women and drag queens, homepage tate <https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/andy-warhol-2121/ladies-and-gentlemen>)