How playboy's obsession with Bardot lived on after divorce
Sotheby's sale reveals portraits that hung on Gunter Sach's wall, even after he married
HIS love for Brigitte Bardot was such that he gave her a £1million diamond after they divorced and later reminisced: “A year with Bardot was worth 10 with anyone else.”
Now, nearly a year after his death, the full scale of Gunter Sachs’s enduring passion for the French actress will be revealed in a sale of his art collection at Sotheby’s.
His third wife, Mirja Larsson, is selling images celebrating Bardot’s beauty which occupied pride of place in his home until his suicide last May.
Miss Larsson, a Swedish former model who married Sachs in 1969 and remained with him until his death, is selling the collection, which is expected to raise more than £20million.
Sachs, a billionaire scion of the Opel car dynasty and one of the last international playboys, memorably wooed Bardot in 1966 by hiring a helicopter to shower her St Tropez home with red roses. The couple married two months later but were divorced after a turbulent three-year marriage marred by infidelity on both sides. That did not diminish Sachs’s passion for Bardot, however.
The star lot is an Andy Warhol portrait of Bardot which Sachs commissioned in 1974, five years after the couple divorced, to hang beside his own portrait on the wall of his St Moritz apartment. The work is expected to fetch up to £4million when it goes under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London on May 22-23.
Sotheby’s described it as “among the most remarkable single-owner collections to appear at auction”.
Sachs also purchased the 1959 photograph by Richard Avedon on which the portrait was based. It was double exposed to emphasise the actress’s trademark pout and mane of blonde hair. The esti- mate for the photograph is £40,000£60,000. The sale comprises almost 300 works in total including furniture, photographs taken by Sachs himself and paintings by Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali and Yves Klein.
One of Warhol’s last self-portraits, Pink Fright Wig, is also included. Sachs befriended the artist in St Tropez in the early 1960s and in 1972 presented the first major Warhol exhibition in Europe at his own gallery in Hamburg.
Not a single picture sold on the opening night so Sachs secretly purchased half of the works himself to save the embarrassment of telling Warhol that the event had been a flop.
Such an act was typical of Sachs, who was renowned for his largesse.
Born into a family of industrialists, he boasted of never having to work for a living although he pursued interests in mathematics, astrology and photography.
His jet-set way of life included a home in St Tropez, where he met Bardot on the beach. He was a widower, his first wife having died during surgery.
The helicopter trick won over Bardot: “It’s not every day that a man drops a ton of roses in your yard,” she later wrote. The couple married in Las Vegas and honeymooned in Tahiti.
There was serial infidelity on both sides, with Bardot having affairs with Mike Sarne, the British pop singer, and Serge Gainsbourg. But the break-up was amicable and the pair remained friends. A decade after their split, Sachs gave Bardot a diamond, said to be worth £1million, to thank her for not taking his money in the divorce.
Sachs shot himself in May last year, aged 78. He left a note saying he had been suffering from “no hope illness A”, believed to be a reference to Alzheimer’s disease.