“This was the first time I had ever traveled with Ultra Violet. She was still a big mystery; nobody knew what her scene was – she kept her life very secret (as opposed to everybody else we knew who were always telling you the most intimate things about themselves). I’d met her one day in ’65 when she walked into the Factory in a pink Chanel suit and bought a big Flowers painting that was still wet for five hundred dollars. Her name was Isabelle Collin Dufresne then and she hadn’t dyed her hair purple yet. She had expensive clothes and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and she drove a Lincoln that was the same as the presidential one. She was past a certain age, but she was still beautiful; she looked a lot like Vivien Leigh. Ultra would do almost anything for publicity. She’d go on talk shows “representing the underground” and it was hilarious because she was as big a mystery to us as she was to everybody else … she’d tell journalists “I collect art and love.” But really what she collected were press clippings. Gradually we pieced together that she was from a rich family of glove manufacturers in Grenoble, France, that she’d come to America as a young girl to visit the painter John Graham (coincidentally in the same building where the Castelli Gallery was), who introduced her around the New York Art world, and then when he died she met Dali, and then she met me, and then she became Ultra Violet. She was popular with the press because she had a freak name, purple hair, an incredibly long tongue and a mini-rap about the intellectual meaning of underground movies.”
/ From POPism: The Warhol Sixties (1980) by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett /
In memoriam: Warhol Superstar Ultra Violet (née Isabelle Collin Dufresne, 6 September 1935 – 14 June 2014) died on this day ten years ago. Pictured: portrait of Ultra Violet by Jack Mitchell, 1971.
