This portrait of Wilhelmina Ross belongs to the Ladies and Gentlemen portfolio, comprising ten screenprints that formed part of the Ladies and Gentlemen commission, which Italian dealer Luciano Anselmino proposed to Warhol in 1974. Between August 1974 and January 1975, Warhol photographed fourteen sitters at the Factory, taking more than five hundred Polaroids, from which he produced paintings, drawings and collages, and the portfolio edition.

The sitters portrayed in the Ladies and Gentlemen series, recruited by Bob Colacello, Ronnie Cutrone, and Corey Tippin, came largely from the Gilded Grape, a bar on Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue, and from the nightclubs of Greenwich Village. Anselmino had asked for portraits of anonymous subjects, and the sitters went unnamed in the titles for almost four decades until the Andy Warhol Foundation identified thirteen of them in 2014.

Here, Wilhelmina Ross is presented in profile, her chin resting on the back of her hand, her gaze lifted beyond the edge of the sheet. Warhol renders the photographic image in a granular black screen over which he lays torn shapes of flat colour: a warm brown for the face and arm, a cobalt headscarf, violet at the eye and shoulder, a slab of yellow beneath the hoop earring, pink across the lips and an orange passage at the fingers. The colour planes sit deliberately askew in the photograph, as though cut and pasted by hand, so that the sitter appears at once documented and reconstructed. The halftone ground that frames the figure, dense and shimmering like static, isolates Ross against the white of the paper and lends the composition an unexpected monumentality.

Of all the models, Ross was evidently Warhol’s favourite. He made seventy-three paintings of her, based on seven Polaroids, as well as twenty-nine drawings, five collage portraits, and five ten-foot-high canvases. Born Douglas Mitchell Hunter in Kansas City, she moved to New York in 1970 and performed with Hot Peaches, the drag theatre company founded by Jimmy Camicia; her stage name reputedly fused the Wilhelmina modelling agency with Diana Ross, a singer Warhol admired. Her poise before the camera, hand draped elegantly at the head or neck, carries directly into the print, where the gesture reads as both glamour pose and quiet self-possession.

The series marks a significant shift in Warhol’s portraiture. Where the images of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy relied on appropriated press photography, Ladies and Gentlemen grew from the artist’s own camera, anticipating the Polaroid-based society portraits that would dominate the following decade. Warhol also used different colours for the individual parts of the face for the first time, a technique that gives the Ross portrait its collaged, painterly vitality. He extended the visual language reserved for Hollywood stars to performers from New York’s underground, affording them the same scale and chromatic bravura.

Long regarded as one of the least known of Warhol’s major bodies of work, the Ladies and Gentlemen series has received sustained institutional attention in recent years, including Tate Modern’s 2020 retrospective, which devoted a room to the paintings, and holdings at Museum Brandhorst in Munich. This particular work, presenting Willemina Ross (Ladies and Gentleman, II.136), stands among the most compositionally resolved sheets in the portfolio, uniting Warhol’s photographic economy with the exuberant colour that defines his mid-1970s practice.