Andy Warhol's work during the first decade of his career, before he became the godfather of pop, proved enormously influential on his life's work, but remains little known. Drag & Draw highlights two series of drawings from this decade, when Warhol began exploring the controversial and, for him, deeply personal subject of cross-dressing.
In the first of these series, Warhol drew a group of vibrant women inspired by photographs of theater divas and men in drag. He delved deeper into the art of dressing as the opposite sex with his second series, a set of portraits of men posing in high- and low-cut drag costumes. This book analyzes the importance of drag in Warhol's work and his debt to the photographs that his friend, the photographer Otto Fenn, expressly staged for Warhol to use. Featuring numerous previously unpublished drawings by Warhol and newly discovered photographic sources, Drag & Draw offers a fascinating insight into drag culture in 1950s New York, a time when it was still largely hidden.
