The Galerie de Buci innovates in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district, opening its first pop-up store with Pop Art legend Andy Warhol. The Marilyns and the Brigittes in screen prints of all colors invite the visitor to approach them, surrounded by their vintage photos.
Warhol began experimenting with screen printing in August 1962, few days before Marilyn's tragic death. “My first experiences with screens were the heads of Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, and then when Marilyn Monroe died that month, I had the idea of making screens of her beautiful face, the first Marilyns,” Warhol recalls in his memoirs. His source of inspiration was one of the photos for the 1953 film Niagara, which Warhol cropped to draw more attention to Marilyn's face. While Marilyn Monroe was 36 years old when she died, Warhol's portraits freeze her forever at the age of 26, when she became one of Hollywood's great stars.
The extreme success and fame of Warhol's Marilyn works can be attributed to the way they captured and critiqued the new cultural phenomenon of celebrity, as well as the speed with which Warhol published the screen prints shortly after her death – an event which had already attracted notoriety and intrigue to the question of who the "real" Marilyn was in life.
By repeating her image endlessly in his art, like cans of Campbell's soup, which are also part of the exhibition at the Galerie de Buci, Warhol deliberately transforms Marilyn from a real person into a product that can be manufactured and consumed. As the artist once said: “The more you look at exactly the same thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and empty you feel.”
12 years later, another world icon made headlines: the retirement announced by Brigitte Bardot at the age of 39 and at the peak of her career caused a shock similar to Marilyn's death. With her typical frankness, she announced: “I have made 48 films, only five of which were good. The rest is worthless. I won't make another one.”
It is the precise moment of Bardot's disappearance from the spotlight that Warhol chose to iconize her by making her portrait. He was perhaps unconsciously repeating the same process that made Marilyn iconic: he consciously applied to her striking features the same formal techniques that he used in his 1964 portraits of Monroe, using a cut frontal point of view and highlighting the eyes and lips with bright colors.
The fundamental difference between the images of the French star made in 1974 and the portraits of Marilyn is that Bardot's image has not been transformed into a cold, impersonal and perhaps even dead pop-icon. The face Warhol presents here is more cinematic, showing a powerful and very disco image of a femme fatale. Shadow-like in the way all of Bardot's features have been drenched in a warm, electric pink/purple tone, her faded image is brought to life by Warhol's use – like Bardot herself – of a bare minimum of makeup on the mouth and eyes. It is for this reason that Warhol's treatment of Bardot as a "star" accentuates her status as an icon, creating a portrait of Bardot as both an individual and a phenomenon.
This exhibition brings together these three "consumer products", icons of the mass market, but also symbols of their time. It presents, through around twenty screen prints and ten photos, the spirit of the epoch when Gentlemen Prefer Blondes et Dieu … créa la femme.
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