Underground celebrity Ultra Violet was born Isabelle Collin Dufresne in 1935 in France, a convent-raised French bourgeois heiress. A coiffured society deb in those days, she moved to New York in 1953 where she spent a decade surrounding herself with artists like John Graham, John Chamberlain, and Salvador Dalí, the last with whom triggered her career as a painter. It was through her relationship with Dali that she eventually met pop icon Andy Warhol in the early 1960′s and changed her name to Ultra Violet, evolving into one of Warhol’s more accessible and unforgettable trashy-chic East 47th Street “Factory” superstars.
Theda Bara and went on to appear in Warhol’s The Life of Juanita Castro (1965) and I, a Man (1967) before her cameo inclusions in other now-cult films. Her best-selling 1988 autobiography “Famous for Fifteen Minutes: My Years with Andy Warhol” detailed her rise in celebrity, and her play “You Are What You Eat” was performed in Czechoslovakia in 1992. As a visual artist with political and spiritual overtones, her mixed-media works have been displayed worldwide. She opened an art studio in Nice in 1990, creating a movement called “L’Ultratique,” publishing two manifestos in the early 1990′s. Her work was included in the Audart exhibition that commemorated the tenth anniversary of Warhol’s death. A bi-continental resident, Ultra Violet currently divides her time between her studio in Nice and her penthouse apartment in Manhattan.
“8. Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style — but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the “off,” of things-being-what-they-are-not. The best example is in Art Nouveau, the most typical and fully developed Camp style. Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto. A remarkable example: the Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the shape of cast-iron orchid stalks.”
Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag, 1964
George Barbier (1882 – 1932) was one of the great French illustrators of the early 20th century. Born in Nantes France on October 10, 1882, Barbier was 29 years old when he mounted his first exhibition in 1911 and was subsequently swept to the forefront of his profession with commissions to design theatre and ballet costumes, to illustrate books, and to produce haute couture fashion illustrations. For the next 20 years Barbier led a group from the Ecole des Beaux Arts who were nicknamed by Vogue as “The Knights of the Bracelet” – a tribute to their fashionable and flamboyant mannerisms and style of dress. Included in this élite circle were Bernard Boutet de Monvel and Pierre Brissaud (both of whom were his first cousins), Paul Iribe, Georges Lepape, and Charles Martin. During his career Barbier also turned his hand to jewellery, glass and wallpaper design, wrote essays and many articles for the prestigious Gazette du bon ton. In the mid 1920s he worked with Erté to design sets and costumes for the Folies Bergère and in 1929 he wrote the introduction for Erté’s acclaimed exhibition and achieved mainstream popularity through his regular appearances in L’Illustration magazine. Barbier died in 1932 at the very pinnacle of his success.
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989) was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres.
Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí’s expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of mediums.
Dalí attributed his “love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes”to a self-styled “Arab lineage,” claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.
Widely considered to be greatly imaginative, Dalí had an affinity for partaking in unusual behavior to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.
Dalí, a colorful and imposing presence in his ever-present long cape, walking stick, haughty expression, and upturned waxed mustache, was famous for having said that “every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí.” The entertainer Cher and her husband Sonny Bono, when young, came to a party at Dalí’s expensive residence in New York’s Plaza Hotel and were startled when Cher sat down on an oddly shaped sexual vibrator left in an easy chair.
When interviewed by Mike Wallace on his 60 Minutes television show, Dalí kept referring to himself in the third person, and told the startled Mr. Wallace matter-of-factly that “Dalí is immortal and will not die.” During another television appearance, on the Tonight Show, Dalí carried with him a leather rhinoceros and refused to sit upon anything else.
One of Dalí’s most unorthodox artistic creations may have been an entire person. At a French nightclub in 1965, Dalí met Amanda Lear, a fashion model then known as Peki D’Oslo.
Lear became his protégé and muse, writing about their affair in the authorized biography My Life With Dalí (1986). Transfixed by the mannish, larger-than-life Lear, Dalí masterminded her successful transition from modeling to the music world, advising her on self-presentation and helping spin mysterious stories about her origin as she took the disco-art scene by storm. According to Lear, she and Dalí were united in a “spiritual marriage” on a deserted mountaintop. Referred to as Dalí’s “Frankenstein,”some believe Lear’s name is a pun on the French “L’Amant Dalí,” or Lover of Dalí. Lear took the place of an earlier muse, Ultra Violet (Isabelle Collin Dufresne), who had left Dalí’s side to join The Factory of Andy Warhol.
Late in his career, Dalí did not confine himself to painting, but experimented with many unusual or novel media and processes: he made bulletist works and was among the first artists to employ holography in an artistic manner. Several of his works incorporate optical illusions. In his later years, young artists such as Andy Warhol proclaimed Dalí an important influence on pop art.
