Brigitte Bardot, the famed French actress who made her name in the 1950s and 1960s, has died aged 91. Bardot, the star of iconic movies such as And God Created Woman (1956), was not just a screen sensation but also an artists’ muse. In 2014, a 1963 painting of Bardot by Gerald Laing sold for £902,500 at Christie’s in London. “Captivating in its sheer size and direct presentation, Gerald Laing’s Brigitte Bardot is a quintessential pop image of the international screen siren of the Swinging Sixties,” said Christie’s at the time.
Laing explained the inception of the work, saying that “the source for the painting of Brigitte Bardot… was the logo on the request for entries for the 1963 Young Contemporaries exhibition—a black and white photograph of Brigitte Bardot on which a black circle had been superimposed”.
Other artists also tried to capture the essence of Bardot, most famously Andy Warhol in a series of trademark 1974 screenprints. “Brigitte Bardot was one of the first women to be really modern and treat men like love objects, buying them and discarding them. I like that,” Warhol said. “In each of the paintings, Bardot’s carnal beauty fills the square canvas in the manner of a record cover, her voluptuous, leonine features framed by abundant, tousled hair,” said a statement from Gagosian gallery which showed the works in London in 2011.
In 1959 meanwhile, the Dutch artist Kees van Dongen painted Bardot at the height of her fame in a Fauvist style while Belgian-born Peter Engels has painted more than 20 portraits of the late actress and animal rights activist. But did Picasso ever paint this French film icon who later embraced animal rights and far-right politics? Bardot visited the Spanish artist at his studio during the 1956 Cannes film festival where she watched him work at the canvas. Sadly it is thought that he never immortalised Bardot, then aged 21, on canvas.
