Gunter Sachs, acquired directly from the artist in 1974 The Gunter Sachs Collection Evening Auction (2012), Lot #23 Private collection, Paris (Acquired from the above by the present owner)

Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne de Paris, Centre Pompidou, Andy Warhol: Retrospective, 1990 Hamburg, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Gunter Sachs - Retrospektive, 2003 Leipzig, Museum der Bildenden Künste, Gunter Sachs, 2008 London, Gagosian Gallery, Warhol: Bardot, 2011

Neil Printz and Sally King Nero, (Eds.), The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 03: Paintings and Sculptures 1970-1974, New York 2010, p. 451, no. 2721, illustrated in colour Glenn O'Brien and Oliver Zahm, Warhol: Bardot, Gagosian, London 2011, p. 45, illustrated in colour

Few figures embodied 1960s liberation and allure as completely as Brigitte Bardot, or "BB" as she was known in France. Her tousled blond hair, winged eyeliner, and full-lipped pout became shorthand for the era's erotic freedom. In post-1968 France, she was not only a movie star but a national emblem. By 1974, at just 39 years of age, Bardot abruptly retired, announcing, "I've made 48 films, of which only five were good. The rest are not worth anything. I will not make another." It was at this juncture — when Bardot turned away from the spotlight — that Andy Warhol immortalized her. As with his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, Warhol was drawn to the moment when fame flickered between vitality and myth. He had painted Monroe in the wake of her death and Taylor while she was gravely ill; Bardot's withdrawal from the screen carried a similar charge of transformation. Her image, suspended between celebrity and memory, became the next chapter in Warhol's pantheon of star-studded heroines. Warhol had first met Bardot in 1967 at the Cannes Film Festival, where he had traveled with his Factory entourage to promote Chelsea Girls. The screening was canceled by the festival's organizers, but the trip led to a more enduring encounter. Bardot's then-husband, the German industrialist and art collector Gunter Sachs, invited Warhol and his group to their villa in St. Tropez. Warhol recalled Bardot descending the stairs to greet them — gracious, radiant, and impossibly famous. "I couldn't get over how sweet that was, "he wrote in his diaries, "to be Brigitte Bardot and still bother to make your guests comfortable." It was there that Sachs likely commissioned Warhol to create her portrait. "The party was half in the house and half on Gunter Sachs' boat," Ultra Violet would later recall. "Bardot was outstanding. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. She looked like a goddess, and Gunter was much in love. This was a new affair for them. Warhol was impressed by the whole setup. Of course he was a celebrity hound. We wound up at some club. I think it was called Vroom Vroom or something. Bardot was so gracious, and when she danced all eyes were on her. She didn't jiggle, she had grace. I think Gunter probably ordered the portrait then." Sachs would become one of Warhol's most devoted patrons. The portraits Warhol created of Bardot in 1974 were to serve as pendants to a corresponding series of himself, intended to hang in his Pop-Art-filled tower apartment at the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz. For Bardot's likeness, Gunter Sachs turned not to a new photograph but to one already mythic: Richard Avedon's 1959 portrait, taken in Paris when Bardot was 25. In Avedon's image, her voluminous hair—arranged by the legendary Alexandre of Paris—ripples outward in sculptural waves, its double-exposed edges vibrating with light. Warhol translated Avedon's photograph into eight canvases of exceptional scale and intensity—seven inches larger in height and width than the society portraits he had typically produced. "Warhol had never worked from such a masterful photograph," critic Glenn O'Brien later observed, "and thanks in part also to Sachs's taste, the Bardot paintings are among the strongest and most iconic of his 1970s portraits. The color combinations in these paintings are as bold as in the Marilyns and the Maos. All of them have a powerful chromatic impact… Some of the paintings are almost searingly psychedelic, radiant to the point of radioactive. Where many of Warhol's portraits are flat, almost color field painting, these elicit the feedback of the Velvet Underground and the black lights and strobes of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Although he was the least mystical of artists, Andy was ingeniously good at rendering in color the aura of a human or a goddess; he knew the Pantone combinations of immortality. The effect is both sensual and spectral. Bardot's face fills the frame, her gaze cool yet magnetic, every strand of hair dazzling in color. Where Warhol's early portraits of Marilyn and Liz translated tragedy into flat, mechanical glamour, Brigitte Bardot vibrates with the pulse of the 1970s disco era. The composition retains Warhol's earlier Pop precision — unmodulated fields, crisp contour lines — but the palette radiates. Her image hums between intimacy and artifice: a goddess rendered in screenprint. For Warhol, Bardot represented a culmination of his lifelong fascination with beauty as commodity and celebrity as religion. She was, as Olivier Zahm later wrote, "the anti-Marilyn" — not a passive object of desire but a self-possessed embodiment of feminine freedom. From her breakout in And God Created Woman (1956) to her role as a national symbol, Bardot had redefined the boundaries of female sexuality on her own terms. Warhol's silkscreen crystallized that paradox: the allure of the sex symbol and the agency of the woman behind it — eternal, untouchable, and luminously her own.

When did "copy" become such a bad word? Back in the High Renaissance, copying was a way to acquire new skills, artists then learned by copying their masters: Michelangelo copied Bertoldo di Giovanni, Raphael did da Vinci, Van Gogh did Delacroix, and the list goes on. Before cameras were at the tip of our fingers, artists even copied their own work before it left their studio. By the beginning of the XXth century, Cubist artists and Duchampians alike looked outside of the canon of art history for their inspiration and began incorporating elements from the day to day into their work –newspaper clippings, ready-mades, and such. Taking mass produced objects, which belong to everyone and no one, and making it their own, aproriare. Fragments of our daily life and objects from the zeitgeist recontextualized and reappropriated by an artist. By the time Andy Warhol came around, the Mona Lisa was not so much a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, as it was a cultural trope and by-product appropriated by the Dada movement. A keen observer and lover of pop culture, Warhol found inspiration in the mainstream like an Impressionist in a bucolic landscape. He turned mass produced objects into art, and people into objects. Having gained the status of 'court painter' (to quote Robert Rosenblum) making commissioned portraits for various New York socialites, Warhol slowly wandered out of said court and into the public square of fandom, introducing portraits of celebrities; Elizabeth Taylor, Mao, Jackie O, starting with Marilyn Monroe. Unlike the commissioned portraits, the images sourced for the celebrity portraits didn't come from Warhol's own Big Shot Polaroid camera, but from popular media sources: advertisements, paparazzi snapshots, propaganda images, anything to further the distance between the individual and the public figure. Treating them as characters or archetypes whether it be the grieving widow, the madonna, or the sex symbol. In Warhol's Catholic culture, I believe they call those 'Icons'. So one can only imagine Warhol's excitement when in 1966, German industrial heir and famed playboy Gunter Sachs showed up at his door with a photo of his then-wife Brigitte Bardot torn from a 1959 Harper's Bazaar requesting Warhol to make a series of portraits from it. The photograph was taken by none other than Richard Avedon at the zenith of Bardot' stardom, following the release of her breakthrough film "And God Created Woman." Forget that she was then married to another man (namely above-film director Roger Vadim), Sachs wanted to capture her at her peak, encapsulating the icon that she was, the sexual revolution she embodied and the national monument she later became (1). Warhol, who had met the actress that summer, could have very much shot his own source image for this commission like he did for all the others, and Sachs could have provided a candid image of her, something more personal. But what makes this request so special, and Sachs' understanding of Warhol so acute, is that they instead used a ready-made like those appropriated for the Icons series. Personal relationship or not, Warhol didn't see Bardot as a pal but as a myth, a character he likely would have made an unprompted portrait of anyway. Warhol came out of his short-lived retirement to complete the series of eight portraits which was delivered in 1974, two years after completing the other commission portraying Sachs himself (using a Jay Ullal photograph for the record). It is hard to imagine the glamour-hungry Warhol passing on this Avedon-Bardot-Sachs Holy Trinity served on a silver platter. The Avedon portrait, by its symmetry and distinct game of shadows and exposures, felt Warholian to begin with, but like a utopic collaboration, Warhol almost picked up where Avedon left off, perfectly framing and accentuating the elements that were already present. The sensuality of her lips, the thickness of her mane, and the depth of her eyes; Bardot's portrait is as mesmerizing as it is unattainable. Now a ubiquitous work, Warhol created his own ready-made, an object as archetypical as its participant, an image that is not his, that is no longer hers, and that belongs to the public. (1) In 1969 Brigitte Bardot became the first personality to become the Marianne, the national emblem for the French Republic in the form of a bust