“
Blonde Rebellion
1/6 »
I post things but you won't like them. Let's kill them... with kindness.
It wasn’t a normal sense of humor. It wasn’t the thing, like, jokes. It was like, she love situations. She thought Ondine and Eddie Hennessey were a scream… She admired the people who could cut loose and not care what the world thought of them.
-Chuck Wein
Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol and poet Piero Heliczer at the Factory.
It wasn’t a normal sense of humor. It wasn’t the thing, like, jokes. It was like, she love situations. She thought Ondine and Eddie Hennessey were a scream… She admired the people who could cut loose and not care what the world thought of them.
-Chuck Wein
Vinyl was Edie’s first Warhol film. She arrived at the Factory just as Gerard Malanga was doing his little torture job in Vinyl on Ramsey Hellmann, this runaways kid from Canada. They’d brought in some real sado-masochists to do the number right, with razor blades and candles. They were very serious, with their leather and all that. Edie had come in at the last moment- no rehearsals, nothing. I thought she was going to demolish all the work I had done. Andy propped her up on a huge trunk, smoking a cigarette, and occasionally she flicked her ashes on this boy who was being tortured. She sat there, sort of stretched out, and the camera just went berserk looking at those eyes. The outfit she wore was certainly calculated… she had no breasts, but she had legs that didn’t quit, so why not show everybody the legs all the time? What do you do with legs like that in the middle of winter, I don’t know… freeze to death?
The film became like one of those vehicles for a famous star, but it’s somebody else who gets discovered… like Monroe in Asphalt Jungle. She had a five-minute role and everyone came running, “Who’s the blonde?”
-Ronald Tavel
But Glinn’s photographs of Edie, Chuck, and Andy in the manhole were taken on January 1, 1966, for an article in the London newspaper The Sunday Times.
I was going to meet Andy, and I went down to the street, and for a while nobody came, and then he showed up with Edie and Chuck Wein. But I didn’t know that they were going to be in the picture… Edie sort of took it over, you know?
She had the bright and the smarts and the instinct… She was going to sit in the ground and lean against it [a manhole], and put her legs up in the air. I don’t want to take credit for any kind of creativity on that… She kind of took over the whole session because Andy didn’t say a word.
I didn’t think of her as a great beauty. I thought of her as a kind of vivacious and lively woman… I think she was attractive, but the thing that made her better is that she made a room kind of come alive when she came in it because, you know, she and Andy used to go to parties kind of as a prop for a party. A party was considered a success if Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick came in. Well, when they came in Andy sort off… you never saw him at all after that, unless he was taking pictures with his Polaroid camera. Edie was the one that gobbled up the room with her energy.
She really, as somebody said, she really could say hello.
When she was with Andy, she reminded me of a Scott Fitzgerald lady, you know? She was alive, and she was able to put a party aspect on everything… So when we did this picture… She lit that thing up. She made it a picture, she made it an occasion.
It was her spirit that set that shot up.
- Burt Glinn
In Paris, Warhol’s gang startled the dancers at Chez Castel by appearing with fifteen rabbits and Edie Sedgwick in black leotard and a white mink coat. In her deep, campy voice, strained through smoke and Boston, she said: “It’s all I have to wear.”
Edie, Andy and Chuck by Burt Glinn
Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol and poet Piero Heliczer at the Factory.
In Marilyn Monroe, Warhol found a fusion of two of his consistent themes: death and the cult of celebrity. The star died tragically in August 1962. In the following two years, Warhol made thirty silkscreen paintings of her, always using the same publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara. This set of nine screenprints was produced in 1967, in an edition of 250. The repeated image serves as the basis for a series of startling colour transformations.
This is an mini animation of a piece I did at A level. It’s my take on Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe silkscreen. My piece, which is on frame 8 of the animation, was done in just plain black and white acrylic. I then used Photoshop to construct the animation.
Edie Sedgwick, Bibbe Hansen, and Gerard Malanga at the Factory, 1965, photographed by Bob Adelman.
