Brigid Polk

Brigid Berlin, who was called Polk because of her persistent habit of "poking" herself with a hyperdermic syringe full of amphetamine, was one of Andy Warhol's closest and most conspiratorial pals at his Factory during its heyday in the late 1960s. A star of Warhol's movie "Chelsea Girls" and a perennial resident of the Chelsea Hotel, Berlin achieved notoriety in 1969 when she was quoted as claiming to have produced all of Warhol's recent work herself. Originally backed up in her claim by Warhol, who revelled in her sense of humor, the artist was soon forced to make a public retraction of their original statements when pressure for clarification from collectors of his work grew too intense.

Berlin met Gerhard Richter in 1971 and gave him a number of colored polaroids of herself from Warhol's Factory which Richter consequently used as the basis of a series of six portrait paintings of her. In this painting, as in two others, Richter portrayed the naked Berlin in front of an image of his large pornographic painting of 1967 Badende ("The Bathers"). By blurring the paint with a stiff brush, Richter's earlier pornographic paintings had deliberatley drained his images of their erotic qualities while at the same time heightening their power as provocative images. Badende was a particularly blurred conglomeration of naked figures merged into a shimmering array of bare flesh which in this portrait painting of Brigid Berlin has been delicately blended into a warm and indistinct background out of which Berlin's face seems to emerge. Given Berlin's past sexual notoriety, the juxtaposition of Berlin against the background of Badende is wholly appropriate.