Ultra Violet (September 16, 1935 – June 14, 2014) was born Isabelle Collin Dufresne in Grenoble, France. She rejected her family’s strict bourgeois Catholic upbringing and moved to New York in the mid-1950s. There, she became closely involved with Salvador Dalí as both student and muse. He introduced her to Andy Warhol in the spring of 1965. Soon after, she purchased a large Flowers painting. Warhol cast her in The Life of Juanita Castro and I, a Man.
Adopting the name Ultra Violet, she sometimes dyed her hair purple and pursued the status of a Warhol Superstar. She observed, “Celebrity is a religion without a god.” Ultra Violet appeared in the Play-House of the Ridiculous production Conquest of the Universe and in Pablo Picasso’s surrealist play Desire Caught by the Tail. After a near-death experience in 1973, she renounced her earlier lifestyle and turned toward spirituality. She then produced paintings and sculpture. In 1981, she published her memoir, Famous for Fifteen Minutes.
