Salsa II
Patterns:
IP13
- The Grapevine: http://app.s2.talkfusion.com/fusion2/view.asp?Mzc0OTQ2NA==_2587016
IP1
- Cape to Wrist Turn: http://app.s2.talkfusion.com/fusion2/view.asp?Mzc0OTQyMA==_2587016
IP4
- Elbow Drop - Intermediate Version: http://app.s2.talkfusion.com/fusion2/view.asp?Mzc1NjA5OQ==_2587016
Edie Sedgwick
Jump to: Overview (5) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (1) | Trade Mark (2) | Trivia (19) | Personal Quotes (37)
Overview (5)
| Date of Birth | 20 April 1943, Santa Barbara, California, USA |
| Date of Death | 16 November 1971, Santa Barbara, California, USA (barbiturate overdose) |
| Birth Name | Edith Minturn Sedgwick |
| Nickname | Princess |
| Height | 5' 4" (1.63 m) |
Mini Bio (1)
Edie Sedgwick was a bright social butterfly whose candle of fame burned brightly at both ends. Born into a wealthy White Anglo-Saxon Protestant family of impressive lineage, Edie became a "celebutante" for her beauty, style, wealth and her associations with figures of the 1960s counterculture.
Edie was born in Santa Barbara into a prominent family plagued by mental illness. Her father, Francis Minturn Sedgwick (1904-1967), was a local rancher who had experienced three nervous breakdowns prior to his 1929 marriage to Alice Delano De Forest, Edie's mother. Francis also suffered from bipolar disorder, and his doctors told Alice's father, the Wall Street financier Henry Wheeler De Forest, that the couple should not have any children. They eventually had eight: Edie was the fourth of five daughters and the second-to-last of the Sedgwick children born from 1931 to 1945. Edie later told fellow Warhol superstar Ultra Violet that both her father and a brother had tried to seduce her when she was a child. She once found her father in flagrante delicto with another woman, and after she tried to tell her mother about his offense, her father denounced her as insane and called the doctor. In Edie's confession to Ultra Violet, she claimed, "They gave me so many tranquillizers I lost all my feelings."
The Sedgwicks were an old line of WASPs whose lineage included Judge Theodore Sedgwick (1746-1813), who had served as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and later Speaker of the House of Representatives in the time of George Washington. The Judge's wife, Pamela Dwight Sedgwick (1753-1807), had lost her sanity during mid-life. The roots of the mental illness that plagued the Sedgwick family likely extend as far back as Pamela Dwight Sedgwick.
Edie was raised on a 3,000-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, bought with money inherited from Alice's father. The family fortunes improved even further in the early 1950s, when oil was discovered on the ranch. The Sedgwick children were educated in a private school constructed on the ranch, and given daily vitamin B shots by a local physician.
Despite their prosperous, Edie's upbringing was plagued with trauma. Her brother Minty was an alcoholic by age fifteen and eventually committed suicide at the Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut in 1964, the day before his twenty-sixth birthday. Her other brother, Bobby, also was troubled by psychiatric problems and was institutionalized after suffering a nervous breakdown in the early 1950s while attending Harvard. He crashed his motorcycle into a bus on New Year's Eve 1964 and died two weeks later.
Edie suffered from bulimia in school, which continued into her adult life. Edie was first institutionalized in the fall of 1962 at the Silver Hill mental hospital (where her brother Minty later died). After wasting away to ninety pounds, she was transferred to the far stricter Bloomingdale, New York Hospital's Westchester County facility. On a furlough from Bloomindale, she became pregnant and had an abortion.
In the early 1960s, Edie lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while attending Radcliffe College. Edie studied sculpture and spent her time partying and driving her Mercedes. At her therapist's office, she met recent Harvard graduate Chuck Wein, who was living a bohemian existence and styled himself as an Edwardian dandy. After she turned 21 in 1964, Eddie left Cambridge for New York, moving into her invalid grandmother's 14-room Park Ave. apartment and spent her nights at the top clubs and discotheques.
Wein came to New York, as well, and became determined to transform Edie into a social butterfly. In January 1965, she was introduced to Andy Warhol, one of the new gods of Pop Art. Wien began bringing her to his work-living space "The Factory" on a regular basis. Blessed or cursed with the soul of a promoter, Wein was continually plotting a strategy to move Edie up into the New York demimonde and further into society.
During one visit with Wein at The Factory, Warhol inserted her into his film "Vinyl" at the last minute." It was her second appearance in a Warhol film, having also appeared briefly in "Horse." Warhol had no illusions about Chuck Wein, but he apparently was attracted by the hustler's blonde good looks. Andy took both of them to Paris in April 1965 for an opening of a show.
When he returned to New York City, Warhol announced that he was crowning Edie "the queen of The Factory," and commissioned screenplays for her. Wein became his new screenwriter and assistant director, beginning with "Beauty No. 2," which starred Edie and premiered at the Cinematheque on July 17, 1965. "Beauty No. 2" made Edie Sedgwick the leading lady of underground cinema. Her on-screen persona was compared to Marilyn Monroe, and she became famous among the independent film glitterati. Her association with Warhol helped secure both his reputation and hers. With the glamorous Edie in tow, Warhol made the rounds of parties and gallery openings, and the dynamic duo generated reams of copy and free publicity. Originally an outsider, Warhol was eventually wooed by wealthy socialites and became a major part of the art establishment.
Her newfound celebrity would prove to be her undoing after many urged Edie to leave Warhol for the mainstream cinema. One of these people was Bob Dylan's assistant Bob Neuwirth, who became Edie's lover, wooing her with the promise of starring in a film with his enigmatic boss. Though Edie reportedly also harbored amorous feelings for Dylan, it is unlikely that her feelings were returned or ever consummated. Edie was under the impression that Albert Grossman, Dylan's manager was going to offer her a film contract. D.A. Pennebaker filmed her at Dylan's studio in 1965 while making what became the documentary "Don't Look Back."
Edie's last film with Warhol was "Lupe," although he may also have filmed her in November 1966 for inclusion in "The Andy Warhol Story," a lost film for which the footage was either lost or destroyed. In 1966, the still-loyal Warhol approached his musical "discovery" Lou Reed, who was appearing with the Velvet Underground in Warhol-produced Plastic Exploding Inevitable (Warhol was the Velvets manager for a while) with a proposition. According to Reed, "Andy said I should write a song about Edie Sedgwick. I said 'Like what?' and he said, 'Oh, don't you think she's a femme fatale, Lou?' So I wrote 'Femme Fatale' and we gave it to Nico."
On February 13, 1966, Edie appeared in photographs with Warhol and Chuck Wein in The New York Times Magazine. Although she still had a crush on Dylan, she did not find out about his secret marriage to Sara Lownds until Warhol told her about it in February 1966. Edie was devastated. Morrissey believes that Edie realized that "maybe [Dylan] hadn't been truthful."
Edie's and Warhol's relationship was further strained by her dissatisfaction with her decreasing role in Warhol's life. Edie and Warhold also argued over money. Edie had always picked up the tab when the Factory regulars hit the town, but she attacked Warhol over his failure to pay her money from the films she had been in. Warhol claimed that the films were unprofitable and told her to be patient. Edie decided to part ways with Warhol. According to Gerard Malanga, a Factory regular, "Edie disappeared and that was the end of it. She never came back."
In the tapes Edie made for "Ciao! Manhattan," she admitted that she had become addicted to her affair with Neuwirth. While they were together, she was consumed by lust, but when they were apart, she turned to pills for comfort. Edie is one of the women pictured on the inner sleeve of Dylan's classic "Blonde on Blonde" album (released May 16, 1966), and she was rumored to be the inspiration of the song "Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat." Other songs rumored to be about her were "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again" (the reference "your débutante") and "Just Like a Woman," which was featured on the "Ciao! Manhattan" soundtrack. (Dylan biographers typically believe the song was a synthesis of several women.)
She tried modeling again and appeared in the March 15, 1966 edition of "Vogue." Her modeling career never took off, however, as the fashion industry shunned people with drug problems. She then turned back to acting, auditioning for Norman Mailer's staging of "The Deer Park," but Mailer turned her down. Edie "wasn't very good," Mailer remembered. "She used so much of herself with every line that we knew she'd be immolated after three performances."
By the end of 1966, Edie's star had gone into eclipse and she never recovered. She was badly addicted to drugs and in six months, she spent $80,000. A typical breakfast in this period was a saucer filled with speed. To support her habit, she stole antiques and art from her grandmother's apartment, and sold them for money. She also turned to dealing but got busted, was briefly incarcerated, and was put on probation for five years. Then, in October 1966, Edie's apartment on East 63rd St. caught on fire by candles. She suffered burns on her arms, legs and back and was treated at Lenox Hill Hospital.
In 1966, Edie returned home to California, where she was committed to a mental hospital. After she was discharged, she moved back to New York and took a room at the Chelsea Hotel, where her drug addiction worsened. By early 1967, her drugged-fueled behavior was so erratic, Neuwirth broke up with her. Edie subsequently took up with her fellow Warhol superstar Paul America. He and Edie Sedgwick became lovers, united in their common lust for drugs, and they lived together for a brief time at the Chelsea Hotel and indulged heavily in speed. Their relationship was an on-again/off-again affair, as America continually left New York for his brother's farm in Indiana, and eventually, friction over control issues forced them apart.
America later appeared with Edie in the long-gestated film "Ciao! Manhattan," his second and last film role. This was supposed to be Edie's breakout role, but the film's execution by Warhol acolytes was amateurish. Shooting on "Ciao! Manhattan," which would prove to be Edie's final film, commenced on April 15, 1967. The shooting was anarchic, with the filmmakers and the actors addicted to speed, which was injected by a physician with whom the production company had set up a charge account. At one point, America left the set and never returned.
After America's departure, Edie wound up in Gracie Square Hospital, where she learned of her father's death, on October 24, 1967.
After her discharge, Edie shacked up in the Warwick Hotel with the screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson, who attracted the fragile Edie with the promise of a screenplay written for her, but ultimately he was unable to deal with the erratic behavior stemming from her drug abuse and left. Edie wound up in Bellevue Hospital, and after being discharged due to the intervention of her personal physician, she overdosed on drugs and was committed to Manhattan State Hospital. By late 1968, Edie was a physical and emotional wreck: by the time she returned to the family ranch for Christmas, she was barely able to walk and talk, the result of poor blood circulation in her brain. She recovered and moved into an apartment near U.C. Santa Barbara in 1969, but by August, she was institutionalized again after a drug bust. She met her future husband, Michael Post, during her stay in the psychiatric ward of Santa Barbara's Cottage Hospital, though upon her discharge, she became the moll of a motorcycle gang in order to obtain drugs. Known as "Princess" by the bikers, she was very promiscuous, sleeping with anyone who would supply her with heroin. She was institutionalized again in 1970.
Edie was furloughed from the hospital in the summer of 1970 to finish filming "Ciao! Manhattan," the last parts of which feature her clearly in the throes of drug dependency. Under the supervision of two nurses, she played out her scenes, including a shock treatment scene (electro-convulsive therapy) filmed in a real clinic. Ironically, she was soon back at the clinic for real, suffering from delirium tremens, where she received actual shock treatment therapy. She underwent a minimum of 20 electro-convulsive treatments from January to June 1971.
Edie married Michael Post on July 24, 1971, managing to stay clean until October. However, that fall, she was prescribed a pain pill to treat a physical debility. In addition, her doctor prescribed barbiturates, possibly to help her sleep, and frequently boosted their effects with alcohol. On the night of November 15, 1971, Edie went to fashion show at the Santa Barbara Museum and was filmed for the last time in her life. The television documentary "An American Family" was being filmed at the museum that night, and Edie - attracted by the cameras as a moth is to flame - walked over and began talking to Lance Loud, one of the subjects of the documentary.
After the fashion show, Edie went to a party but was asked to leave after her presence caused another guest to rave at her for being a heroin addict. Edie, who had been drinking, called her husband to come retrieve her from the soirée. Back at their apartment, Edie took her prescribed pain medication and they both went to sleep. That morning, when Post awoke at 7:30 AM, he found Edie dead next to him. Her death was ascribed as "acute barbiturate intoxication" and was ruled an "Accident/Suicide" by the coroner. Edie is buried in the tiny Oak Hill Cemetery in Ballard, California.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood
Spouse (1)
| Michael Post | (24 July 1971 - 16 November 1971) (her death) |
Trade Mark (2)
Shoulder-length earrings
Cropped blonde hair and dark eye makeup
Trivia (19)
Came from a wealthy family in Massachussetts, but was raised on her parents' ranch outside Santa Barbara, California, and privately schooled.
First cousin once removed of actress Kyra Sedgwick and actor Robert Sedgwick.
On the last night of her life, Edie attended a fashion show in her home city of Santa Barbara and even managed to get herself on camera one last time when the documentary crew for An American Family (1973) showed up to film Lance Loud. Later that night, at a party, a palm reader grabbed her hand and was taken aback by her very short life line - to which Edie sweetly replied, "It's okay - I know."
Edie burned down her Sutton Place apartment in October of 1966 and moved into the Chelsea Hotel. She burned down at least one more room at that historic residence before management placed her in Room 105 above the lobby - and just down the hall from the same room Sid Vicious would one day allegedly kill his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.
Was introduced to Andy Warhol by television producer Lester Persky in January of 1965 and appeared in Vinyl (1965), her first official Warhol film, in March of 1965.
Dated singer/songwriter Bob Dylan before he married Sara Dylan; his songs "Just Like A Woman" and "Like A Rolling Stone" came largely from their relationship. (Andy Warhol appears in the latter song, as "Napoleon in rags.")
Spent her entire trust fund from the Sedgwick family fortune in just a few months, promoting Andy Warhol and entertaining his clients and hangers-on. This never seemed to register with Warhol, who continued to deride her as a "poor little rich girl" (also the title of one of his movies with her), and wondered out loud when she died if her husband of a few months would "get her money." (Warhol was told curtly by a friend "Edie didn't have any money. She spent it all on you.")
Was the 7th out of eight children.
Her great-great-great grandfather was Judge Theodore Sedgwick. He'd been Speaker of the House of Representatives in the time of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington and had also been the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
Her husband, Michael Post, woke up on the morning of November 16, 1971 to find Edie lying dead next to him in bed. The Coronor classified her death as an 'accident/suicide' and the cause of her death as 'acute barbituate intoxication'.
Misha Sedgwick (no relation), portrayed her in a 2004 off-Broadway play.
Is portrayed by Sienna Miller in Factory Girl (2006)
In 1989, the British rock group, The Cult, consisting of Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy, released their "Sonic Temple" album. One of the songs paid tribute to Edie Sedgwick. The song is called "Edie (Ciao Baby)".
Edie filmed the first part of Ciao Manhattan (1972) from April to August of 1967. Filming completely fell apart when she spontaneously took off to California to eventually hang out at the infamous "Castle" with Nico and sometimes guest Jim Morrison - among others. After a brief trip to Boston to film Lulu - a short film by Richard Leacock - she returned to Manhattan essentially homeless and, by early 1968, was repeatedly institutionalized in mental hospitals.
Grew up on an isolated ranch in Santa Barbara, California, where she and her siblings had their own private school. They made daily visits to the doctor's office, where they were given Vitamin B injections.
At her funeral, her casket was covered with magnolias. Her wedding bouquet had also been made up of magnolias.
On the last night of her life, she attended a fashion show and party for designer Michael Novarese, where she was berated by a fellow guest about supposedly being a heroin addict. The guest was a woman named Veronica Janeway, who was asked to leave after causing the disturbance.
Did not have her ears pierced until the late '60s when she stopped wearing her signature 'shoulder-duster' earrings.
Was a self-confessed kleptomaniac who would steal from department stores, gift shops, and occasionally from friends and family. Though later it would be mainly to support her drug habit, she would also steal small objects like silverware, pens, lighters, and figurines. According to Andy Warhol, she was also compulsive hoarder (another kleptomaniac trait) and stashed copious amounts of drugs and makeup in particular.
Personal Quotes (37)
I came to New York to see what I could see - that's from a children's book, isn't it? - and to find the living part.
I lived a very isolated life. When you start at 20, you have a lot of nonsense to work out of your system.
It's not that I'm rebelling. It's that I'm just trying to find another way.
I made a mask out of my face because I didn't realize I was quite beautiful. God blessed me so. I practically destroyed it. I had to wear heavy black eyelashes like bat wings, and dark lines under my eyes, and cut all my hair off, my long dark hair. Cut it off and strip it silver and blonde. All those little manoeuvres I did out of things that were happening in my life that upset me.
The very things I might have given in to, that demanded, that said, this is your life. I mean, this is your only way to survive, are the things I fought hardest to end. 'Cause I believed in something else. And um, what makes that sane is that I can understand other people's situations in their own terms, but "they" still can't understand mine.
It was really sad - Bobby [Neuwirth]'s and my affair. The only true, passionate, and lasting love scene, and I practically ended up in the psychopathic ward. I had really learned about sex from him, making love, loving, giving. It just completely blew my mind - it drove me insane. I was like a sex slave to this man. I could make love for forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours, without getting tired. But the minute he left me alone, I felt so empty and lost that I would start popping pills.
I had no money. My parents closed down all credit. I couldn't get any money, and they were trying to lock me up again because I'd taken some acid and told my psychiatrist about it. I just told him what the experience was like and he jumped, and at the same time he read about Andy Warhol's "pornographic" movies in Time. I was in the studio a lot, so my psychiatrist got really upset and called my parents and was gonna have me put away, so I ran away to Europe with Andy and Chuck.
But fashion as a whole is a farce, completely. The people behind it are perverted, the styles are created by freaked out people, just natural weirdos. I know this because I worked with all those people while I was modelling.
I'll have to put more earrings on. I bet that someone could analyze me and tell my condition by my earrings.
I moved out to Santa Barbara to straighten out, supposedly, and I started using drugs, which I found were plentiful in Isla Vista, around the college campus - UCSB. And then I started rollicking around with all kinds of kids a lot younger than me. Anywhere from 15 to their 20s, but I was kind of in my late 20s. And, uh...I had fun, but I really didn't have anyone I particularly loved. And I still don't, except for loving friends, but I mean I haven't been in love with anyone in years and years. But I have a certain amount of faith that it'll come.
[Describing the orgy scene in Ciao! Manhattan]: The whole place turned into a gigantic orgy, every kind of sex freak, from homosexuals to nymphomaniacs, especially the needle and mainlining scene, losing syringes down the pool drains and blocking up the water infiltration system with broken syringes. Oh, it was really some night...Drinking, guzzling tequila, vodka, and scotch, and bourbon, and shooting up every other half-second, and just going into an incredible sexual tailspin. Gobble gobble gobble gobble. Just couldn't get enough of it. It was one of the wildest scenes I've ever been in or ever hope to be in, and I should be ashamed of myself. I'm not, but I should be.
I want a further step for me...that's my process of development. I don't want to cut it off. I understand where it's been cut off for other people, and I understand the whole process in that order of things, but I see no way in that isn't a trap, that will let me out again without damaging too much, you know?
I heard about this doctor who gave vitamin shots, and they were very stimulating and kept you going for quite a while. I was under treatment with vitamin therapy, just multivitamin shots. But I heard about this super deal that this other doctor had. A guy I was going out with at the time told me not to go to him, never to have his shots. So I immediately took them, thinking there must be something special about them...And there was. And I went, and that was the beginning of injecting drugs. I went to a doctor for it. I didn't handle it myself until a year later. I turned into a total speed freak for a few months. That's about as long as I could survive, and then I placed myself in the hospital.
You care enough, that you want your life to be fulfilled in a living way, not in a painting way, not in a writing way...you really do want it to be involving in living, corresponding with other living objects, moving, changing, that kind of thing.
[on Andy Warhol]: I'm a little nervous about saying anything about the artist, because it kind of sticks him right between the eyes, but he deserves it. He really fucked up a great many people's, young people's lives.
I have an accident about every two years, and one day it won't be an accident.
When I started going around with Andy people thought I had a press agent. I didn't. After a while I got sort of paranoid about all the publicity, and I holed up in my apartment and cut off the telephone for two months. I saw only two people. Then I felt ready to go out again. I want to do more acting. I like it, but it's hard - the long hours, getting the lines straight, I didn't have to do that with Andy.
[on why she rejected offers from Hollywood]: I need the support of my friends.
[Describing the aftermath of a drug-fueled sexual encounter]: Something very strange happened. I didn't realize I was going to say it, and I said, out loud, "I wish I was dead." And the reason I said it was the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience was really an alien experience in a way, because I didn't even know him. It was a one-night jag. He was married and had children, and I just felt really, like, lost. It just wasn't worth living anymore because I was all alone again.
They say use it, channel it. Do it, like there will be a sign, be an artist, you're so creative, do anything, you've got to do it, use it. Then, things like, and you've got to collect yourself, too. I mean, you know, make your hair more about yourself, self-respect. But I mean, ridiculous. You know why my doctor got so mad this time? He said, that scene, remember in the LSD bit, the only time I had it in that, sleeping with what's-his-name and having that sex bit go on while, it was very strange-mannered, but I certainly wasn't mortified. I mean, I humanly might be a little mortified knowing that a thousand other human beings would think it mortifying, but basically, me. So he thought that was a total lack of self-respect, which is wrong. Totally wrong.
I act this way because that's the way I feel like acting. If people like it, fine. If they don't, that's their problem.
[Referring to a house fire]: It's not going to interfere with the film. I heal miraculously. I've been in an auto accident and another fire. They thought I'd need plastic surgery, but I haven't a scar...No, I don't think I'm accident prone, but it's strange.
[Describing a dream]: It's like my having to walk down thousands and thousands of white marble stairs...and nothing but a very very blue sky, very blue, like...Yes, and I'd have to walk down them forever. I never thought about going up...I don't know, don't you think that must mean something? It never occurred to me to turn it around, I mean, why didn't I think that way? This was after I had the car accident.
[on Bob Neuwirth]: He very much disapproved of drugs. The minute he'd leave me I felt so empty and so lost. If I wasn't in the act of love-making, I'd be scheming about how to get drugs.
I think drugs are like strawberries and peaches.
[on the 60's flower children]: It's sort of like a mockery in a way of reality because they think everything is smiles and sweetness and flowers when there is something bitter to taste. And to pretend there isn't is foolish. I mean the ones that wonder around and know, at the same time, and yet wear flowers, and they deserve to wear flowers. And they've earned their smile...you can tell by people's eyes.
{Addressing artist Salvador Dali]: What's it like being a famous writer?
[on the Factory crowd]: The way those sons-of-bitches took advantage of me. Warhol is a sadistic faggot.
[Describing Manhattan State psychiatric hospital]: It was one of the most unpleasant experiences I've ever been through. Really terrifying. I lived in a big dormitory on a ward with about sixty to eighty women. We all did the mopping, cleaning, making beds, scrubbing toilets. And the people there were just so awful. Really pathetic. Some of them were mean. The staff completely ignored you except to administer medication. I thought it was never going to end.
You want to hear something I wrote about the horror of speed? Well, maybe you don't, but the nearly incommunicable torments of speed, buzzerama, that acrylic high, horrorous, yodelling, repetitious echoes of an infinity so brutally harrowing that words cannot capture the devastation nor the tone of such a vicious nightmare. Yes, I'm even getting paranoid, which is a trip for me. I don't really dig it, but there it is.
[Describing a fight with her lover, Bob Neuwirth]: I was just livid, out of hand. I got madder and madder as we drove along, and just as we drove by the Chelsea Hotel I did something. I've never done anything to hurt anyone, and yet I was so furious that I pressed the button and rolled down the window screen - the glass plate between the front and back seats - and I told the chauffeur that the man in the back was molesting me, he was a junkie! I was so horrified by what I said, so I flipped out by that, that I jumped out of the car into the path of oncoming traffic, certain that my head would be crushed. All that happened was that I got bruised, badly bruised, but no broken bones. I mean, I was conscious, not destroyed at all. But I'd done such a terrible thing! I couldn't reconcile that. I had been about to explode. The hotel people came out, and they and Bobby carried me in. I had to pretend I was unconscious because I couldn't comprehend the fact that I had tried to get him busted, to hurt him seriously. He was the only person I had ever gotten violent about. I take whatever violence comes into my system much more heavily on myself than on anyone else. But that was a pretty tight squeeze. I really craved making love to him.
[on falling pregnant after her first sexual experience]: I'd been two years locked up in hospitals. I was twenty when I got out from Bloomingdale and I met a young man from Harvard who was very attractive in a sort of Ivy league way. And we made love in my grandmother's apartment and it was terrific, it was just fabulous. That was the first time I ever made love and I had no inhibitions or anything. It was just beautiful. I didn't get my period and so I had to tell my doctor. The hospital pass was given to see if you could handle yourself outside, so I was terrified to tell him that I thought I was pregnant, but I finally did. I was pregnant...I could get an abortion without any hassle at all, just on the grounds of a psychiatric case. So that wasn't too good a first experience with lovemaking. I mean, it kind of screwed up my head, for one thing. This fellow found out. I was upset...and he asked me, and I said "I'm pregnant. I'm not going to ask you for anything, so don't get uptight, but it's just kind of making me uncomfortable. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do about it." He split, and I didn't see him again until the summer had passed and I went to Cambridge for my first free year.
I held out pretty long before I really had an affair, but I got lots of attention from my father physically. He was always trying to sleep with me...from the age of about seven on. Only I resisted that. And one of my brothers who claimed that sisters were there for the purpose of teaching...a sister and brother should teach each other the rules and the game of making love; and I wouldn't fall for that either. I just felt, I had no reason to feel. Nobody told me that incest was a bad thing or anything, but I just didn't feel turned on by them.
When I was in the hospital, I was very suicidal in a kind of blind way, I was starving to death and just 'cause I didn't want to turn out like my family showed me, you know, that's all I ever saw of people, was my own family. I wasn't allowed to associate with anyone. Oh, God. So I didn't want to live.
But I really, since I exist, at all, I believe that it's possible for people...I've lived through impossible situations. So I believe in it. I just believe, and that's the magic...That's the whole thing, you talk about magic that there's to believe in, and it is there. But most people don't really believe in it. And I refuse, like, since I'm still alive and done the things I've done and seen things and understood things as far as I have, and I am alive, I mean physically intact. When I shouldn't be, according to medical reports and so forth. I mean I should be, not here. That's all there is to it. So the magic's working and it's a rare situation.
This is what growth is all about. Why do people stop developing, or, like they stop the way you can rate their, psychologically, their development? Where they stop, and just from being children to maybe stopping at a very adolescent age, and they stay there until they die. Physically die. I mean, they react adolescently. They don't change. They don't develop. They don't - it's that continual read, that process which is is the total threat for the ego.
Born Andrew Warhola
Early Life
Born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in the neighborhood of Oakland in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Andy Warhol's parents were Slovakian immigrants. His father, Ondrej Warhola, was a construction worker, while his mother, Julia Warhola, was an embroiderer. They were devout Byzantine Catholics who attended mass regularly, and maintained much of their Slovakian culture and heritage while living in one of Pittsburgh's Eastern European ethnic enclaves.
At the age of 8, Warhol contracted Chorea—also known as St. Vitus's Dance—a rare and sometimes fatal disease of the nervous system that left him bedridden for several months. It was during these months, while Warhol was sick in bed, that his mother, herself a skillful artist, gave him his first drawing lessons. Drawing soon became Warhol's favorite childhood pastime. He was also an avid fan of the movies, and when his mother bought him a camera at the age of 9 he took up photography as well, developing film in a makeshift darkroom he set up in their basement.
Warhol attended Holmes Elementary school and took the free art classes offered at the Carnegie Institute (now the Carnegie Museum of Art) in Pittsburgh. In 1942, at the age of 14, Warhol again suffered a tragedy when his father passed away from a jaundiced liver. Warhol was so upset that he could not attend his father's funeral, and he hid under his bed throughout the wake. Warhol's father had recognized his son's artistic talents, and in his will he dictated that his life savings go toward Warhol's college education. That same year, Warhol began at Schenley High School, and upon graduating, in 1945, he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute for Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) to study pictorial design.
Artistic Career
http://www.rayjohnsonestate.com/art/mail-art-and-ephemera/
http://www.rayjohnsonestate.com/biography/
Johnson holding a banner of a bunny head, preparing for a performance, 1991
Ray Johnson (center right) in Josef Albers' class at Black Mountain College, c. 1948
Calm Center, ca. 1951
Oil on Wood, 28 x 28
Oil on Wood, 28 x 28
Moticos Installation, c. 1954-55
Duchamp with Star Haircut, 1968
15 1/2 x 11 3/4
15 1/2 x 11 3/4
Exhibition flyer for New York Correspondence School (NYCS) exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1970-71
A Ray Johnson "Nothing", Delaware, Summer 1965
Photo by William S. Wilson
Photo by William S. Wilson
Mailing, Meeting Seating, 1968
Gertrude Stein with Judy Garland's Kitchen, 1975
Collage on Masonite, 20 3/4 x 27 3/4 inches
Collage on Masonite, 20 3/4 x 27 3/4 inches
Unpublished letter sent to The New York Times, 1973
Silhouette University Mailing, 1976
RAY JOHNSON BIOGRAPHY
“Make room for Ray Johnson whose place in history has been only vaguely defined. Johnson's beguiling, challenging art has an exquisite clarity and emotional intensity that makes it much more than simply a remarkable mirror of its time, although it is that, too.”
–Roberta Smith, The New York Times (1995)
–Roberta Smith, The New York Times (1995)
Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was a seminal Pop Art figure in the 1950s, an early conceptualist, and a pioneer of mail art. His preferred medium was collage, that quintessentially twentieth-century art form that reflects the increased (as the century wore on) collision of disparate visual and verbal information that bombards modern man. Integrating texts and images drawn from a multiplicity of sources — from mass media to telephone conversations — Johnson’s innovativeness spread beyond the confines of the purely visual. He staged what Suzi Gablik described in Pop Art Redefined as perhaps the “first informal happening” and moved into mail art, artist books, graphic design, and sculpture, working in all modes simultaneously. Johnson not only operated in what Rauschenberg famously called "the gap between art and life," but he also erased the distinction between them. His entire being – a reflection of his obsessively creative mind – was actually one continuous "work of art." His works reflect his encyclopedic erudition, his promiscuous range of interests, and an uncanny proto-Google ability to discover connections between a myriad of images, facts and people.
Born in Detroit, Michigan on October 16, 1927, Johnson grew up in a working class neighborhood and attended an occupational high school where he enrolled in an advertising art program. He studied at the Detroit Art Institute and spent a summer in a drawing program at Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan, an affiliate of the Art Institute of Chicago. Leaving Detroit in the summer of 1945, he matriculated at the progressive Black Mountain College, where he spent the next three years with the exception of the spring of 1946. He studied painting with former Bauhaus faculty Josef Albers and Lyonel Feininger, as well as Robert Motherwell. By the summer of 1948, Johnson had befriended summer visiting lecturers John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, and Richard Lippold and fellow student Ruth Asawa. He participated in “The Ruse of Medusa,” the culmination of Cage’s Satie Festival (characterized by scholar Martin Duberman as “a watershed event in the history of ‘mixed-media’”) with Cage, Cunningham, Fuller, the de Koonings, and Ruth Asawa, among others.
In early 1949, Johnson moved to New York City and became an active participant in the downtown art scene. Alongside the American Abstract Artists group, Johnson painted geometric abstractions heavily influenced by the imagery of his former professor, Josef Albers. Johnson destroyed most of this work and turned to collage soon thereafter.
By 1954, Johnson was making irregularly shaped "moticos,” his name for small-scale collages upon which he pasted images from popular culture such as Elvis Presley, James Dean, Shirley Temple, and department store models. Johnson’s 1950s moticos anticipated Warhol's 1960s Pop imagery. However, his attitude towards fame remained the antithesis of Warhol’s. He continually dodged it and was dubbed “the most famous unknown artist” by Grace Glueck in a 1965 New York Times article in which she discussed his deliberate elusiveness. Johnson carried boxes of moticos around New York, sharing them with strangers on sidewalks, in cafes, and even in Grand Central Station. He solicited and even occasionally recorded the public’s response to his intricate creations. After a number of performance-like installations of these works in 1954-55, Johnson burned a plethora of them in Cy Twombly’s fireplace, a gesture that John Baldessari later replicated in his “Cremation.”
From the early 1960s onwards, Johnson would reuse his “moticos,” cutting them up to create tiny compositions that he glued onto small blocks of layered cardboard. He would then ink, paint, and sand these “tiles” or “tesserae,” using them in his extremely complex collages whose underlying structural emphasis on repetition and variations of semi-geometric forms relate to the eccentric minimalism of fellow artists Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse. These collages reveal his profound understanding of cubism and his intent to explore it in different forms. Johnson incorporated meaningful texts into his work beginning in the 1950s – letters or fragments of words, names of celebrities, literary figures, and art-world denizens, both historical and current. He pointed his viewers towards marvelous connections between them and a world of metamorphosing glyphs that became part of Johnsons’s ever-expanding lexicon of text and forms. An artistic alchemist, Johnson could turn the detritus of ordinary life into proverbial art “gold.” In his typically self-deprecating way, Johnson would say that he did not make Pop Art, he made “Chop Art”.
In 1958, Johnson was already recognized as part of the nascent Pop generation. In a review of a Jasper Johns’ exhibition, a critic for ARTnews stated: “Johns’ first one-man show (...) places him with such better-known colleagues as Rauschenberg, Twombly, Kaprow and Ray Johnson.” Around 1959, Johnson met Billy Linich (later known as Billy Name) at New York’s Serendipity, and in 1963 Johnson introduced him to Warhol. Billy Name became a key figure at Warhol’s Factory, responsible for covering the Factory walls with silver, an idea he credited to Johnson.
Johnson was one of the first conceptualists, an heir to Marcel Duchamp whom he may have met in 1961. Johnson shared his enthusiasm for the elder Frenchman’s work with many of his contemporaries. In Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés, Michael Taylor notes, “The public display of Johnson’s work helped to situate him as a crucial figure in the post-World War II dissemination of Duchamp’s art and ideas, alongside cultural luminaries such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Jasper Johns.” Johnson was one of the key artists to incorporate exhortations to the observer to participate actively in the work of art itself. His interest in codes, poetics, and semiotic systems looked back to Duchamp, while anticipating the enlarging contemporary conceptual practices, and the development of appropriation in particular, during the early second half of the 20th century.
Throughout the early stage of his career and spanning its duration, Johnson sought out the random and the ephemeral, incorporating chance operations into his artistic practice with “mail art.” He gradually built up an informal, hybrid network of friends, acquaintances, and strangers with whom he exchanged ideas and artworks by means of the postal system. By 1958, he began to write, “Please send to...” on his mailings, thereby creating even more sub-networks among the hundreds of correspondents in his greater mail art organization. By 1962, when it was named the “New York Correspondance [sic] School,” his virtual “school” of correspondents had become a network for a web of communication by mail that eventually spread across the nation and around the globe.
Johnson was an early instigator of performance art, actively participating in events by James Waring and Susan Kaufman, among others, and staging his own starting in 1957 that included "Funeral Music for Elvis Presley" and "Lecture on Modern Music.” Johnson's compositions were performed at The Living Theatre and during events such as the Fluxus “Yam Festival” of 1963. From 1961 on, Johnson periodically staged events he called "Nothings,” described to his friend William S. Wilson as “an attitude as opposed to a happening,” which would parallel the “Happenings” of Allan Kaprow and later Fluxus events. The first of these, "Nothing by Ray Johnson," was part of a weekly series of events in July 1961 at AG Gallery, a venue in New York operated by George Maciunas and Almus Salcius. Ed Plunkett later recalled entering an empty room: " . . . Visitors began to enter the premises. Most of them looked quite dismayed that nothing was going on . . . Well, finally Ray arrived . . . and he brought with him a large corrugated cardboard box of wooden spools. Soon after arriving Ray emptied this box of spools down the staircase … with these … one had to step cautiously to avoid slipping … I was delighted with this gesture.” Johnson’s second Nothing took place at Maidman Playhouse, New York, in 1962. Furthermore, the carefully orchestrated circumstances of his suicide on Friday the 13th, 1995 have prompted the suggestion that the process of his drowning was his “final performance.”
On April 1, 1968, the first of the meeting of the New York Correspondance School was held at the Society of Friends Meeting House on Rutherford Place in New York City. Johnson called two more meetings in the following weeks, including the Seating-Meeting at New York’s Finch College, about which John Gruen reported: “It was . . . attended by many artists and ‘members’ . . . all of whom sat around wondering when the meeting would start. It never did . . . people wrote things on bits of paper, on a blackboard, or simply talked. It was all strangely meaningless — and strangely meaningful.” Until his death, Johnson continued to mail out an extraordinary quantity of material, including elements of chopped-up collages; drawings with instructions (“please add to and return...”); found objects; snakeskins; plastic forks; and annotated newspaper clippings, to name only a few. To Johnson, “art” rejected physical limitations, the restraints of time, or a single identifiable goal. In this capacity, Johnson privileged inclusivity, deeming anyone and everyone with whom he interacted suitable for creative exchange.
Richard Feigen was an early champion of his work, holding one-man exhibitions in New York and Chicago from 1966-72, including I Shot an Arrow into the Air It Fell to Earth in the Ear of an Artist Living in Flushing, New York Tit Show(1970) and Dollar Bills (1970). From 1968-1974, Johnson produced an ambitious body of work, received critical attention on the pages of Artforum, and was featured in several major exhibitions. In 1970, The Whitney Museum of American Art organized Ray Johnson: New York Correspondance School, which served as a major form of cultural validation for Johnson’s practice. Additionally, Johnson had several solo shows at Willard Gallery (New York) as well as Famous People’s Mother’s Potato Mashers (1973) at Galleria Schwarz (Milan) and Ray Johnson’s History of the Betty Parsons Gallery (1973) at the Betty Parsons Gallery (New York), and participated in the group exhibition Post Card Show(1971-72) at the Angela Flowers Gallery (London).
Richard Feigen was an early champion of his work, holding one-man exhibitions in New York and Chicago from 1966-72, including I Shot an Arrow into the Air It Fell to Earth in the Ear of an Artist Living in Flushing, New York Tit Show(1970) and Dollar Bills (1970). From 1968-1974, Johnson produced an ambitious body of work, received critical attention on the pages of Artforum, and was featured in several major exhibitions. In 1970, The Whitney Museum of American Art organized Ray Johnson: New York Correspondance School, which served as a major form of cultural validation for Johnson’s practice. Additionally, Johnson had several solo shows at Willard Gallery (New York) as well as Famous People’s Mother’s Potato Mashers (1973) at Galleria Schwarz (Milan) and Ray Johnson’s History of the Betty Parsons Gallery (1973) at the Betty Parsons Gallery (New York), and participated in the group exhibition Post Card Show(1971-72) at the Angela Flowers Gallery (London).
On June 3, 1968, the day Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol, Johnson was mugged at knifepoint in lower Manhattan. Two days later, the world was shocked by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles. These traumatic events prompted Johnson's abrupt departure to Glen Cove, Long Island, to house he described as a "small white farmhouse with a Joseph Cornell attic." He then relocated to nearby Locust Valley, where he lived in ever-greater reclusiveness. As his contemporaries became famous, Johnson gradually but purposefully closed off his private life and dwelling, but still maintained connections via his mail art, the telephone, and various activities in the Locust Valley community. Johnson, referring to himself as a “mysterious and secret organization,” eventually achieved legendary status as a “pure,” completely un-commercial artist. His underground reputation bubbled beneath the surface into the 1980s, despite his physical absence from the scene. Johnson’s presence continued to be felt by those who admired him including Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Chuck Close, Robert Rauschenberg, and a close circle of friends, admirers, and collectors. Only a handful of people were ever allowed into his house and around 1978, he ceased to exhibit or sell his work commercially. In contrast to his physical seclusion, Johnson's pre-digital network of correspondents increased exponentially. Johnson feverishly developed richer and more complex collages, which Whitney Museum curator, Donna de Salvo, described as “extending the compositional network beyond the parameters of an individual work and into the wider world."
On April 5, 1973, Johnson declared the “death” of the “New York Correspondance School” in an unpublished letter to the Obituary Department of The New York Times but continued to practice mail art under this and other rubrics.
In 1976, Johnson began his Silhouette project, which involved creating over 200 profiles of friends’, artists’ or famous peoples’ faces, which he would often use as the basis for collages. Subjects included “a who’s who of the New York arts and letters scene”: Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, Paloma Picasso, James Rosenquist, Richard Feigen, Frances Beatty, William S. Burroughs, Nam June Paik, David Hockney, Peter Hujar, and Roy Lichtenstein, among others.
On April 5, 1973, Johnson declared the “death” of the “New York Correspondance School” in an unpublished letter to the Obituary Department of The New York Times but continued to practice mail art under this and other rubrics.
In 1976, Johnson began his Silhouette project, which involved creating over 200 profiles of friends’, artists’ or famous peoples’ faces, which he would often use as the basis for collages. Subjects included “a who’s who of the New York arts and letters scene”: Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, Paloma Picasso, James Rosenquist, Richard Feigen, Frances Beatty, William S. Burroughs, Nam June Paik, David Hockney, Peter Hujar, and Roy Lichtenstein, among others.
On January 13, 1995, Johnson was seen dressed in black diving off a bridge in Sag Harbor, Long Island and backstroking out to sea. Many aspects of his death involved the number "13": the date, his age, 67 (6+7=13), as well as the room number of a motel he had checked into earlier that day, 247 (2+4+7=13). There was much speculation amongst critics, scholars, admirers, and law-enforcement officials about a “last performance” aspect of Johnson’s drowning. After his death, hundreds of collages were found carefully arranged in his Long Island home. A retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1999), which traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts as well as solo and group shows in the US and abroad, including Paris, London, Oslo, Budapest, and Barcelona, began the process of re-introducing Johnson’s work to a broader audience. Johnson is considered one of the major artistic innovators of the second-half of the 20th century within the critical community but his work remains underexposed and underappreciated by the general public.
Following Johnson’s suicide, filmmakers Andrew Moore and John Walter, with the support and oversight of Frances Beatty, Vice-President of Richard L. Feigen & Co. and director of the Ray Johnson Estate, spent six years probing the mysteries of Johnson's life and art. Their collaboration yielded the award-winning documentary, How To Draw a Bunny, released in 2003. How To Draw a Bunny examines Johnson's life, art, his ambivalent attitude towards fame, and finally his mysterious death. The film includes interviews with artists Chuck Close, James Rosenquist, Billy Name, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and the founder of The Living Theatre, Judith Malina, among many others. A decade after his death, the network of mail artists continues to grow, numbering in the thousands of general correspondents. Although Johnson's death left many questions, his life's work is evidence of a powerful and original sensibility unique in the history of Modern Art.
Richard L. Feigen & Co. represents the Ray Johnson Estate
