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Andy Warhol’s Celebrity Portraits—a Legacy of Beauty and Glamour
A 1974 silkscreen captures the elusive Brigitte Bardot at the height of her career—and brilliantly illustrates the mid-century fascination with celebrity.
I n 1966, the German industrialist and influential collector Gunter Sachs courted actress Brigitte Bardot by hovering over her Riviera villa in a helicopter and dropping thousands of red roses into the garden before jumping out after them. They eloped to Las Vegas, and for three years the Sachs-Bardot marriage became shorthand for a particular strain of European glamour: jet-set, sunlit, reckless with beauty. They divorced in 1969, but remained on good terms.
Sachs met Andy Warhol in St. Tropez in 1967, during the artist’s trip to promote Chelsea Girls (1966) at Cannes. He subsequently became one of Warhol's most influential patrons, playing a key role in introducing and framing his work for a continental audience. At a moment when he and Bardot were actively shaping the visual language of modern celebrity, their collaboration with Warhol can be seen as extending beyond patronage into a broader cultural moment that helped define the aesthetics of fame itself. The patronage began with an exhibition of his work in Hamburg in 1972. That same year, he commissioned a series of eight portraits of himself for the walls of his apartment in the tower of the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz. He envisioned a corresponding group of Bardot portraits as a deliberate extension of this personal and cultural narrative. But, when the time came, Bardot refused to sit for the portrait.
Unlike the majority of Warhol’s portraits of the 1970s, the Bardots are not based on a Polaroid that he took. Rather, they were based on a 1959 photograph by Richard Avedon, who shared the title credit with the hairdresser, Alexandre of Paris—that is, Louis Alexandre Raimon, stylist to Elizabeth Taylor, the Duchess of Windsor, and nearly every couture house on rue Cambon. Bardot’s image, the credit slyly suggests, was always the result of a carefully constructed collaboration. Avedon posed her against a grey seamless (the same backdrop he used two years earlier for his portrait of Marilyn Monroe) and double-exposed her famous mane such that each curl appears to vibrate in place. The effect is uncanny: the Avedon shimmers with the out-of-register quality Warhol would normally produce through a misaligned silkscreen.
Coming to auction in Sotheby’s Now & Contemporary Evening Auction in New York this May, is the crown jewel of the series of eight Bardots that Warhol ultimately produced. It shows the actress at age 24, face-on and cropped tight: acid lime green accented with pale lilac eyelids and vermillion lips, her halo of hair flowing outward as if caught mid-movement. Unlike the standard 40-inch canvases Warhol used for his celebrity portraits of the 1970s, the Bardots measure 47.25 inches square. The series aligns closely with the early-1960s portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor and Jackie Kennedy Onassis—the works that first fused Pop art with the cult of celebrity.
A European goddess in Warhol’s pantheon, the portrait captures her at the height of career, despite being created after she stepped away from acting. “I gave my beauty and my youth to men,” she later said, reflecting on her decision to leave the limelight behind and age on her own terms. And that may be the most striking fact about the picture: Warhol strove to record the moment a person became a collective construction. His silkscreen catches her in three tenses at once: the 24-year-old at the height of her fame, the adored and romanticized wife, and the cinematic icon projected flat against the canvas, already becoming what Warhol always made of his subjects—an image the world can keep long after the person has gone.
