Isabelle Collin Dufresne

French American artist and author (1935–2014)

Isabelle Collin Dufresne (6 September 1935 – 14 June 2014), known professionally as Ultra Violet, was a French American but she rebelled at an early age. In 1953, she received a BA in Art at Le Sacré Cœur in Grenoble, France. She soon left France to live with an older sister in New York City. In the 1960s, Dufresne began to follow the progressive American Pop Art scene including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and James Rosenquist.

In 1963, Dalí introduced Dufresne to Andy Warhol at the Saint Regis New York Hotel, She would eventually appear in more than 20 films, not counting numerous documentaries made at the Factory. In later reminiscences, she would name Ruscha, Chamberlain, Nureyev, and Forman among her past lovers. Although a full participant in activities at the Factory, she generally avoided the heavy drug usage prevalent at the time, saying that her body reacted badly to drugs. She had tried smoking as a rebellious teen, had gotten very sick as a result, and resolved to abstain from drug usage. She would later observe, "If I had lived like all those young people, I would be dead today".

In 1988, Ultra Violet published her autobiography, Famous for 15 Minutes: My Years with Andy Warhol. This autobiography was edited extensively and partially translated from French to English by her New York penthouse roommate Natalie Durkee. After a review of the book in The New York Times,

In 2000, she was featured in Message to Andy Warhol, a "concept art documentary" by Laurent Foissac. On 10 April 2005, she joined a panel discussion "Reminiscences of Dalí: A Conversation with Friends of the Artist" as part of a symposium "The Dalí Renaissance" for a major retrospective show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her conversation with another former Dalí protégée, French singer/actress Amanda Lear, is recorded in the 236 page exhibition catalog, The Dalí Renaissance: New Perspectives on His Life and Art after 1940. In 2006, she had a solo show at Stefan Stux Gallery in Chelsea, Manhattan. In 2007 she gave a retrospective lecture at the New York Institute of Technology. In 2010, filmmaker David Gerson released Ultra Violet for Sixteen Minutes, a short documentary showing her perspectives on fame, art, religion, and her current artistic practice. In 2011, she was featured in a brief article about the surviving former Warhol "Superstars". Regarding her famous past and her artwork today, she has said, "People always want to know about the past, but I'm much more interested in tomorrow". In 2011, she exhibited a series of artworks as her personal memorial of the September 11 attacks, which were displayed in the exhibit Memorial IX XI at Queensborough Community College. In a 2012 interview, she said, "I'm a New Yorker, I'm an American, and I'm an artist. Because of those three things, I had to do something about 9/11, and the question was what to do, which is not simple." She gave her last TV interview for the German documentary about obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), Wie ich lernte, die Zahlen zu lieben (How I Learned to Love the Numbers), by Oliver Sechting and Max Taubert. In 2014, she exhibited in four different solo and group shows, in New York and in Nice. Her last exhibition at the Dillon Gallery in Manhattan, Ultra Violet: The Studio Recreated, closed three weeks before her death. On 12 August 2014, independent record label Refinersfire released a posthumous limited edition 2 disc collection of original music and private conversations of Ultra Violet and Andy Warhol. The music was recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and features cover performances of "La vie en Rose", "Mojo Queen", and the original songs "Famous for Fifteen Minutes" and "Moon Rock". Ultra Violet also had recorded private telephone conversations between herself and Andy Warhol, which feature topics such as police harassment, their films, the business of art, the RFK assassination, and Valerie Solanas and her attempt on Warhol's life.