Wonderful original painting of a horse by Edie Sedgwick, accomplished in graphite, acrylic, and watercolor on a 15 x 9.75 sheet of artist board, depicting a brown mare in an attractive full-length profile pose, signed in the lower right corner, “EMS-68.” Matted to an overall size of 19 x 14.5. In fine condition.
Sedgwick was under the pall of heavy drug use in 1968 and, for much of the year, resided in recovery and psychiatric hospitals around New York, including Bellevue Hospital, the New York State Psychiatric Institute, Lenox Hill Hospital (where she was temporarily pronounced dead after an overdose), Gracie Square Hospital, and the Manhattan Psychiatric Center. Her mother removed her from the latter in the late fall of that year and brought her home to California, where she remained for the remainder of her life.
Horses, as much of her artwork reveals, served as a creative anchoring point for Sedgwick throughout her life, a go-to subject from a childhood spent on California ranches. As a youth, she topped broomsticks with hand-made animal heads and she often enjoyed ‘playing horse,’ which her sister Suky described as: ‘You had to look at a picture and you would choose what you wanted to look like. Edie used to make me stare at the picture of a goddamn horse’s face for hours…She inevitably chose something that was very delicate and very Arab…always a beautiful prancing princess-type horse.’
From the Michael Post Collection.
