Edie Sedgwick - Andy Warhol's Mad Muse, or "People Should Fall in Love with Closed Eyes"

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

They were called the King and Queen of Manhattan, and they appeared in public in the same clothes and hairstyles. She was 22 years old, he was 37. Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick they seemed to many to be an ideal couple, and for about a year it really was like this: the cult figure of pop art and his Muse brought to life the most insane projects and endlessly shocked the audience.

Edie Sedgwick was from a wealthy aristocratic family, but her life could hardly be called cloudless: her father suffered from manic-depressive psychosis, the family doctor recommended that he "refrain from procreation", but the family had 8 children. One of the brothers committed suicide, the other, also suffering from mental disorders, crashed on a motorcycle. Eddie herself could hardly be called balanced: from her youth she suffered from anorexia and was treated in a psychiatric clinic.

When famed artist Andy Warhol met Edie in 1965, he said: “One look at her and I saw that she had more problems than any other person I have ever met. So beautiful and so sick. " By the age of 22, she had a huge condition, an unbalanced psyche and problems with alcohol and drugs. Andy Warhol's "Factory", which was simultaneously an apartment, a workshop, a film studio and a club, at first glance fascinated Edie with its crazy and creative atmosphere. The brightest representatives of bohemia gathered here, here Warhol filmed her in his films (Vinyl, Kitchen, Girls from Chelsea, etc.). These works did not have commercial success and were practically not shown outside the "Factory", but they were very actively discussed at one time.

Edie Sedgwick is often called one of the most commercially successful projects of Andy Warhol and a favorite model of the fashion magazine "Vogue". It was during that period that her image was transformed and began to be replicated by numerous imitators: a short haircut for a boy, bleached hair, lowered eyes, false eyelashes, painful thinness, short dresses, black tights, massive earrings. She became the muse of all the poets of Manhattan. The artist's unconventional orientation did not bother Edie: she called herself "Mrs. Warhol" and accompanied her Pygmalion everywhere.

Warhol said of her: “She was absent-minded and defenseless, this made her a reflection of everyone's secret fantasies. She could be anyone - a little girl, a woman, smart, stupid, rich, poor. Wonderful, wonderful dummy."

This idyll did not last long: in early 1966, model Edie Sedgwick met musician Bob Dylan and fell in love with him. He dedicated songs to her and promised to make her a singer and actress if she left Warhol. Edie fulfilled his requirements, but she never got to sing with Dylan and star in the film with him. It also did not work to move in with him, as she planned, - Bob forgot to tell her that he had recently married.

By the end of 1966, Edie had squandered almost all of her huge inheritance and could no longer do without cocaine and heroin. One day she fell asleep with lit candles - the apartment burned down, she was hospitalized with burns. After that, she went into prostitution to get a new dose, and increasingly ended up in hospitals. In between hospitals and attempts to commit suicide, Eddie even managed to marry one of the clinic's patients.

Andy Warhol argued: "People should fall in love with their eyes closed." Edie Sedgwick not only followed this rule - she seems to have lived her entire life without opening her eyes. At the age of 28, she died of an overdose. Andy Warhol survived her by 16 years.

Andy Warhol often photographed celebrities, and then created portraits, replicating them at the "Factory": 10 stellar shots and a few selfies of the king of pop art