Iconic Pop painter Andy Warhol’s portraits of celluloid beauty Brigitte Bardot

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) is considered as a defining figure not only of the famous Pop Art movement of the 1960s but of a whole new entire cultural era. He worked across a vast range of media like painting, print-making, drawing, photography, sculpture, film, TV, publishing and performances.

Gagosian Gallery London hosts an exhibition of his portraits of Brigitte Bardot. In each of the paintings, her carnal beauty fills the square canvas in the manner of a record cover, her voluptuous, leonine features framed by abundant, tousled hair. She has been described in a curatorial essay as ‘the original sex kitten’, ‘a superstar of French New Wave cinema’, and ‘the embodiment of liberated feminine sensuality’.

Brigitte Bardot was also the subject of Simone de Beauvoir's 1959 essay ‘Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome’ that described her as a ‘locomotive of women's history’, building upon existentialist themes to declare her the first and most liberated woman of post-war France. Her crowning achievement occurred in 1963 as Camille in Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave masterpiece ‘Contempt’, based on Alberto Moravia's emotionally raw account of a marital break-up, set against the intrigues of the international film industry.

Andy Warhol first met her at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival. In 1973, at the peak of her fame, she publicly announced her retirement from making films. In the same year the painter received the commission to make her portrait. He perhaps viewed her coincidental screen exit as the perfect opportunity to commemorate and idolize her in art.

Bardot then was as beautiful and famous as ever, her smoldering gaze, inimitable pout and flowing blonde hair epitomizing the sexual allure and free-spirited energy that defined a new era. In these portraits, based on an iconic magazine photograph by Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol applied similar formal techniques to those that he had used in the portraits of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe - a cropped frontal viewpoint to go with contrasting palette (pink/purple, blue/red, green/black) with vivid primary accents on lips and eyes.