Having that throwback picture of artist Sean Fader on my screen yesterday led me, via his 16yo tumblr post to an absolute barnstormer of a lecture by art historian David J. Getsy at Dia last February.
Getsy spoke about Warhol and trans visibility in the 1970s, but it wasn’t so much a critique or analysis of Warhol. Warhol was a lens as Getsy laid out a complicated and fascinating narrative where the prominent but stereotypical depictions of trans Factory actresses like Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, and Jackie Curtis in Paul Morrissey’s Warhol-branded films became an object of critique by queer underground theater artists, specifically The Magic Hype, a 1973 transploitation spoof of Warhol’s Factory by the trans and street queen theater troupe, Hot Peaches. I cannot believe that’s one sentence.
But the culmination, which Getsy characterizes as a feedback loop, is an even more nuanced reading of one of Warhol’s largest and least considered bodies of work, a series of portraits of trans women of color begun in 1974 and known as Ladies and Gentlemen. Warhol went far beyond the 105 paintings commissioned from him by Turin art dealer Luciano Anselmino, ultimately producing 268 paintings, more than 65 drawings, a 10-print portfolio, and hundreds, if not thousands, of Polaroid headshots of at least 14 women. But all that is less relevant to Getsy’s critique than the experience of the most frequently depicted model in the series, actress Wilhelmina Ross.
Ross was the star of and inspiration for The Magic Hype, and Warhol made at least 78 paintings of her. While the story of Ladies and Gentlemen has Warhol’s assistants hiring street queens for anonymous photo sessions, Getsy makes the compelling case that these women, and especially Ross and Marsha P. Johnson, knew exactly who they were posing for, and approached the situation with self-awareness, agency, and joy.
The longest thing I’d seen to date on Ladies and Gentlemen was Glenn Ligon’s essay in the catalogue for Donna De Salvo’s 2018 Warhol retrospective at the Whitney, where Ligon focuses on Johnson and the color and joy she brought to Warhol’s shoot. Both Ligon in print and De Salvo in the Dia Q&A try to argue that this series’ color and painterly experimentation were crucial for Warhol’s practice, but Getsy did not come to center Warhol. [In other signs of our times news, the Whitney catalogue required Ligon to use lower case black, and when he republished his essay in his 2024 collected writings, Distinguishing Piss from Rain, he used Black.]
Besides Ligon’s essay, Getsy’s talk had me searching more on the history of the identification, erasure, and recuperation of the names of Warhol’s models. At first this 2021 essay by Gürsoy Doğtaş for Contemporary & seemed like the kind of unearned backpatting that Getsy abjures, even as De Salvo took/gave credit for the Whitney including the models’ names in the works’ titles.
But then in his bio, Doğtaş an art historian in Vienna, said, “he started writing this article when he noticed that Vienna’s Mumok Museum, unlike other museums, did not mention the name of the sitter, Wilhelmina Ross, in the title of a painting from the Ladies and Gentlemen series – and that its cooperating partner QWIEN/Center for Queer History – did not even see a problem with this.”
And reader, when I tell you it gets worse: mumok’s text for their monumental painting, is transphobic, misogynistic, and derisive all at once, while also citing the series’ pivotal role in many aspects of Warhol’s practice. It also interprets Ross as doing a drag impersonation of Josephine Baker, when Getsy argues—and, I think, the over 500 photos Warhol took of her confirm—that Ross was entirely herself.