
Photo courtesy of FSG
In 1852 in the Bloomsbury district of London, a young woman was laying around the studio of a famous artist.
This was Elizabeth Siddall, known muse and model to The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an avant-garde collective of painters and thinkers who defied the rules of the established culture. They created revolutionary pieces, printed their own magazine, and scandalized the stuffy Victorians. Elizabeth Siddall was the face and body who posed for some of their greatest works, and in 1852 she was laying on her back, as if floating dead in the water, for John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia.”
It was a divisive piece upon its premiere.The Times(UK) wrote, “there must be something strangely perverse in an imagination which souses Ophelia in a weedy ditch, and robs the drowning struggle of that lovelorn maiden of all pathos and beauty.” Today, however, it is inescapably famous, an image whose influence has spread across fashion and film. Millais’ Ophelia is the prototypical mad girl, the out-of-control daughter, the surrender to sadness, the toxically idealized youth in the arms of death, who never had to grow up.
“There are still people obsessed with her tragedy, her narcissism, her inability to engage, to connect,” Alice Sedgwick Wohl, an art scholar and translator told me over the phone from her home in Stockbridge, Mass. "All of that negativity. I always thought people tended to grow towards the light, so to speak. It’s hard for me to imagine the idea that people are obsessed with such a fatal image.”
Wohl wasn’t speaking about Ophelia, or Elizabeth Siddall the artist’s muse — whose anorexia and tuberculosis ended her life at 32. She was talking about her younger sister, Edie Sedgwick.
At 91 years old, Wohl’s new book is very different from her previous work translating historic treatises on art theory. “As It Turns Out: Thinking About Edie and Andy” is a kind of double memoir. It details both the privileged but troubled childhood she and her sister shared and the journey of the present-day Wohl, coming to terms with Edie’s fame for the first time. 50 years after The Swinging Sixties, Alice Sedgwick Wohl is finally reckoning with the art made her sister an icon.
Edie and Alice grew up as members of the storied Sedgwick family, a Brahmin clan of upper-class Anglicans whose American origins trace back to the 17th-century Colony of Massachusetts Bay, arriving as part of the Puritan migration to New England. “The Sedgwick Pie” as their well-known cemetery plot in Stockbridge is called, contains Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Sedgwick, former owner of The Atlantic Ellery Sedgwick and early American feminist author Catherine Sedgwick. The girls were raised on a Californian ranch, a secluded "paradise" that kept them cloistered away and disciplined.
“If you had seen my family, there were eight children. I’m quite ordinary looking — but the others were quite handsome, and Edie was beautiful,” Wohl told me. “My family looked like a hundred million dollars. The ranch was the most beautiful place, the life we led was the most wonderful life possible.” She paused to add, “But underneath it was something else.”
Underneath was the private psychological horror the children endured, and what Wohl described to me as “a powerful code of silence” that kept them maintaining the facade that they were a happy family. Days after their brother Francis “Minty” Sedgwick hanged himself the day before his 27th birthday, another brother, Bobby, 31, died crashing his motorcycle into a New York City bus. Edie had her own demons, sent to a series of increasingly restrictive stays at psychiatric care facilities for her disordered eating.
But in 1964, with an inheritance in her bag and thick painted liner around her Sphinx eyes, Edie moved to Manhattan and within the year had caught the attention of Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland, as well as the leader of Pop Art himself, Andy Warhol.
As if it were her own downtown cotillion, Edie captured attention from all factions of the media upon making her New York debut, from the glossy print establishment to the counterculture scene of Warhol’s Factory. She was “the beautiful young blue-blooded heiress who was said to have blown through a six-figure inheritance in a matter of months,” Wohl writes.
Speaking to Wohl however, the exact nature of Edie’s appeal still eludes her. “I don’t know how to express what she had, but she had it,”
“It,” some would say, is exactly the word to express. Edie Sedgwick was perhaps the ultimate It Girl, famous for no inherent talent except possessing an indefinable, enviable quality. The moniker originally stems from Clara Bow and her 1927 film based on the Elinor Glyn novel. In the collection “It and Other Stories,” Glyn writes, “To have ‘It,’ the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes. He or she must be entirely unselfconscious and full of self-confidence, indifferent to the effect he or she is producing, and uninfluenced by others.”
There is some poetry to the sister’s paths. Despite their differences — Wohl describes herself reading Tolstoy as a teenager, while Edie never read a book — one went on to study art, the other became art herself.
“She was an object,” Wohl said, agreeing with the assessment. “She simply existed very powerfully and vigorously in herself. She really wasn’t interested in anything else. Her mind was completely unfurnished.”
At the height of her glamorous New York days, Warhol filmed Edie in the underground short, “Poor Little Rich Girl,” a sometimes-in-focus black-and-white look at the life of a socialite; smoking cigarettes in her apartment, drinking coffee, putting on her makeup. Following the experimental film’s premiere, Village Voice critic Jonas Mekas wrote that Andy Warhol’s “Poor Little Rich Girl”, “surpasses everything that cinéma vérité has done till now.”
Seven years later, her connections to elite publications like Vogue diminished and her artistic relationship with Warhol in the past, Edie was found in her final pose, laying still one winter morning, having died at age 28 of an overdose.
In her own memoir, “Just Kids,” Patti Smith writes about hearing of Edie Sedgwick’s death. “When I was a teenager I found a copy of Vogue with a photograph of her pirouetting on a bed in front of a drawing of a horse. She seemed entirely self-possessed, as if nobody in the world existed but her.”
With the release of “As It Turns Out,” what has surprised Alice Sedgwick Wohl is how many young women like Patti Smith, with photos of Edie on the walls of their girlhood bedrooms — or more likely, on Instagram accounts acting as digital mood boards — still exist. At a recent talk at the Rizzoli Bookstore in New York, Wohl speculated that two-thirds of the audience must have been young women, no older than Edie’s age when she starred in “Poor Little Rich Girl.”
What’s more surprising is that she would be surprised, but perhaps Wohl is simply too well-read. If you have relaxed your mind a little and let the internet worm its way between your brain’s crevices, then our 21st-century fetishistic obsession with doomed girls — conventionally beautiful, young, and cruelly disposable — is readily apparent. Their destructive burn out is as equally captivating to our vulture-like consumption of content as their rise. The dawn of the millennium saw many heirs to Edie, from the famous-for-being-famous Paris Hilton, to the darker, drug-fueled death of Amy Winehouse, to Lindsay Lohan — who exists somewhere in between them. Pop singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey has crafted her musical persona as a retrograde victim, a word-weary coquette humming sad idylls to the loss of old money glamor, her bad past, her character’s sure-to-be short life.
The dictum often mis-attributed to Andy Warhol goes, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” But in 2022 fame is more ephemeral and indefinable (Addison Rae has 88 million followers on TikTok, but you've never heard of her). We are awash in a sea of poor little rich girls, on our phones, across our feeds — cast off gaze, lobotomized soft focus in the eyes, open parted lips, a vacant pout. Social media as it stands is an ode to these girls, an ode, not without harm, to youth, to thinness, to whiteness. They are muse without artist, or perhaps the artist as Narcissus. This year i-D magazine published a piece about the “dissociative stare," the expression du jour of the online girl, in which negativity and coolness, sadness and vanity collide. Rayne Fisher-Quann wrote, “Selfie poses are self-conscious in the most literal sense: they necessitate an awareness of the self and a sense of purpose in controlling how it’s perceived.”
But that’s the opposite of “it” as Elinor Glyn described, isn’t it?
When everyone’s an it-girl, is there any “it” left?
Alice Sedgwick Wohl will discuss her book at Cornwall Library in Cornwall, Conn. on Oct. 15 at 6 p.m. live and on Zoom. In-person guests must register at www.cornwalllibrary.org.
A new book remembers the life of Edie Sedgwick, the original rich girl influencer. Photo courtesy of FSG
'Ophelia' by John Everett Millais Digital Collage by Alexander Wilburn
SHARON — Angela Derrick Carabine, 74, died May 17, 2025, at Vasser Hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was the wife of Michael Carabine and mother of Caitlin Carabine McLean.
A funeral Mass will be celebrated on June 6 at 11:00 a.m. at Saint Katri (St Bernards Church) Church. Burial will follow at St. Bernards Cemetery. A complete obituary can be found on the website of the Kenny Funeral home kennyfuneralhomes.com.
Sam Waterston
On June 7 at 3 p.m., the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington will host a benefit screening of “The Killing Fields,” Roland Joffé’s 1984 drama about the Khmer Rouge and the two journalists, Cambodian Dith Pran and New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg, whose story carried the weight of a nation’s tragedy.
The film, which earned three Academy Awards and seven nominations — including one for Best Actor for Sam Waterston — will be followed by a rare conversation between Waterston and his longtime collaborator and acclaimed television and theater director Matthew Penn.
“This came out of the blue,” Waterston said of the Triplex invitation, “but I love the town, I love this area. We raised our kids here in the Northwest Corner and it’s been good for them and good for us.”
Waterston hasn’t seen the film in decades but its impact has always remained present.
“It was a major event in my life at the time,” Waterston said of filming “The Killing Fields,” “and it had a big influence on me and my life ever after.” He remembers the shoot vividly. “My adrenaline was running high and the part of Sydney Schanberg was so complicated, so interesting.”
Waterston lobbied for the role of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for years, tracing his early interest to a serendipitous connection while filming in England. Even before Joffé’s production was greenlit, he had his sights set on playing the role. “I knew I wanted the part for years even before it was a movie that was being produced.”
What followed was not just critical acclaim, but also a political awakening. “The film gave all of us an intimate acquaintance with refugees, what it is to be a refugee, how the world forgets them and what a terrible crime that is.”
In Boston, at a press stop for the film, two women asked Waterston a pointed question: now that he knew what he knew, what was he going to do about it? “I said, ‘Well, you know, I’m an actor, so I thought I’d go on acting.’ And they said, ‘No, that’s not what you need to do. You need to join Refugees International.’” And join he did, serving on the organization’s board for 25 years.
Both Schanberg and Dith Pran, whose life the film also chronicles, were “cooperative and helpful … in a million ways,” Waterston said. Upon first meeting Pran, Waterston recalled, “He came up to me, made a fist, and pounded on my chest really hard and said, ‘You must understand that Sydney is very strong here.’ He was trying to plant something in me.”
There were more tender gestures, too. Schanberg used the New York Times wire to relay that Waterston’s wife had just given birth while he was filming in Thailand, adding to the personal and emotional connection to the production.
Though “The Killing Fields” is a historical document, its truths still resonate deeply today. “Corruption is a real thing,” Waterston warned. “Journalism is an absolutely essential part of our democracy that is as under siege today as it was then. It’s different now but it’s the same thing of ‘Don’t tell the stories we don’t want heard.’ Without journalists, we are dust in the wind.” Waterston added, “Democracy is built on the consent of the governed but the other thing it’s built on is participation of the governed and without full participation, democracy really doesn’t stand much of a chance. It’s kind of a dead man walking.”
When asked what he hopes the audience will take away from the screening, Waterston didn’t hesitate. “This is the story that puts the victims of war at the center of the story and breaks your heart. I think that does people a world of good to have their hearts broken about something that’s true. So, I hope that’s what the impact will be now.”
Tickets for the benefit screening are available at www.thetriplex.org. Proceeds support Triplex Cinema, a nonprofit home for film and community programming in the Berkshires.
Scott Reinhard, graphic designer, cartographer, former Graphics Editor at the New York Times, took time out from setting up his show “Here, Here, Here, Here- Maps as Art” to explain his process of working.Here he explains one of the “Heres”, the Hunt Library’s location on earth (the orange dot below his hand).
Map lovers know that as well as providing the vital functions of location and guidance, maps can also be works of art.With an exhibition titled “Here, Here, Here, Here — Maps as Art,” Scott Reinhard, graphic designer and cartographer, shows this to be true. The exhibition opens on June 7 at the David M. Hunt Library at 63 Main St., Falls Village, and will be the first solo exhibition for Reinhard.
Reinhard explained how he came to be a mapmaker. “Mapping as a part of my career was somewhat unexpected.I took an introduction to geographic information systems (GIS), the technological side of mapmaking, when I was in graduate school for graphic design at North Carolina State.GIS opened up a whole new world, new tools, and data as a medium to play with.”
He added, “When I moved to New York City, I continued that exploration of cartography, and my work eventually caught the attention of the New York Times, where I went to work as a Graphics Editor, making maps and data visualizations for a number of years.”At the New York Times, his work contributed to a number of Pulitzer Prize winning efforts.
In his work, Reinhard takes complex data and turns it into intriguing visualizations the viewer can begin to comprehend immediately and will want to continue to look into and explore more deeply.
One method Reinhard uses combines historic United States Geological survey maps with “current elevation data (height above sea level for a point on earth) to create 3-D looking maps, combining old and new,” he explained.
For the show at Hunt Library Reinhard said, “I knew that I wanted to incorporate the place into the show itself. A place can be many things.The exhibition portrays the exact spot visitors are from four vantage points: the solar system, the earth, the Northwest Corner, and the library itself.” Hence the name, “Here, Here, Here, Here.”
He continued, “The largest installation, the Northwest Corner, is a mosaic of high-resolution color prints and hand-printed cyanotypes — one of the earliest forms of photography. They use elevation data to portray the landscape in a variety of ways, from highly abstract to the highly detailed.”
This sixteen-foot-wide installation covers the area of Millerton to Barkhamsted Reservoir and from North Canaan down to Cornwall for a total of about 445 square miles.
For subjects, he chooses places he’s visited and feels deeply connected to, like the Northwest Corner.“This show is a thank you to the community for the richness that it has brought to my life. I love it here,” he said.
The opening reception for the show is on June 7 from 5 to 7 p.m. On Thursday, June 12, Reinhard will give a talk about his work from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the library.“Here, Here, Here, Here” will be on display until July 3.
Scott Reinhard’s 16-foot-wide piece of the Northwest Corner is laid out on the floor prior to being hung for the show. L. Tomaino
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