Warhol's Queens

Warhol's Queens combines the artist's portraits of actual female royalty with images of drag queens. For Warhol (1928-1987), both these genuine and fake queens epitomized idealized femininity, devoting their lives to presenting an unattainably glittering pageantry to the public for (not all too) close inspection. This volume juxtaposes Warhol's Polaroids of Princess Caroline of Monaco, Farah Diba Pahlavi and the then-Crown Princess Sonja, of Norway, with drag queens, whom Warhol characterized as "living testimony to the way women used to want to be, the way some people still want them to be and the way some women still actually want to be." The intense faces with their exceptionally colored lips, eyes and hair are both aloof and strangely intimate. With its in-depth scholarly essays, this book is essential for fans of Warhol's portraiture and camp culture.