Andy Warhol: Bardot at Gagosian Gallery, London
Andy Warhol: French icon Brigitte Bardot at Gagosian Gallery. 2011
Edited: June 2017
Andy Warhol: French icon Brigitte Bardot, even if you cannot title one movie she was ever in (And God Created Woman) has a really recognizable look. Andy Warhol knew it, too.
An exhibition of Andy Warhol’s portrait sequence of Brigitte Bardot simply opened at Gagosian Davies Street in London, with 5 of the works by no means being exhibited publicly earlier than, and by no means collectively in sequence.
Here is a bit of backstory and historical past of the exhibit: Warhol first met Brigitte Bardot at the Cannes Film Festival in 1967 when she actively supported his try to indicate The Chelsea Girls there after the unique deliberate screening had been canceled.
In 1973, on the top of her fame, she introduced her retirement from making movies. That similar year Warhol obtained the fee to make her portrait. At this time that he was shifting his focus from filmmaking again to portray and maybe considered her coincidental display exit as the right alternative to commemorate and idolize her in an artwork.
At the time of the fee, Brigitte Bardot was as lovely and well-known as ever. Her flowing blonde hair, and the free-spirited vitality and sexual attraction that outlined a brand new period. In these portraits of her, primarily based on an arresting taken by Richard Avedon in 1959, Warhol utilized comparable formal strategies to these.
He used it for his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. A cropped frontal viewpoint and contrasting palette (blue/purple, pink/purple, inexperienced/black) with vivid main accents on eyes and lips. In every of the work, Brigitte Bardot’s carnal magnificence fills the SQ. Canvas within the method of a report cowl, her voluptuous, leonine options framed by flowing, tousled hair.
Brigitte Bardot was the unique intercourse kitten, a celebrity of French New Wave cinema and an icon of female sensuality.
Only aged eighteen, she gained sudden and worldwide for her movie role in Roger Vadim‘s directorial debut named “And God Created Woman” (1956).
And God Created Woman broke censorship taboos with its titillating show of intercourse and eroticism in St Tropez. Despite combined vital critiques, the movie launched her profession and presaged her worldwide stardom.
Brigitte Bardot additionally caught the eye of French intellectuals: she was the topic of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1959 essay Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, which described her like a locomotive of girls’ historical past, constructing upon existentialist themes to declare her probably the most liberated lady of post-war France.
Her crowning achievement occurred in 1963 as Camille in Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave masterpiece Contempt, primarily based on Alberto Moravia’s emotionally uncooked account of a marital break-up, set in opposition to the intrigues of the worldwide movie trade.
