Netflix has 7 part series about Andy Warhol. I’m not a big Andy Warhol fan – I always found his art a bit cold. At the same time, I’m not not an Andy Warhol fan. I started watching the series ’cause I was intrigued and wanted to find out what made the guy tick.
The series is based on the Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett. Warhol started keeping a diary, but soon stopped writing it himself – he spoke with Hackett every morning via telephone and dictated the diary to her. The documentarists, with the approval of the Warhol Foundation, synthesized Warhol’s voice, thus we hear the entries as Warhol himself may have read them.
In the first episode, we learn that Warhol (family name Warhola) left Pittsburgh in 1949 and headed for New York. Warhol’s voice talks about walking up 7 flights of stairs with his sketches. It’s mentioned that Warhol was an artist for Glamour, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar, we see a few magazine covers, a few shots of illustrations of women’s shoes, and next thing ya know, it’s the 60s and Warhol is a sensation. Wait, what? What happened during intervening years before Warhol made a name for himself? The series never really explores this.
Then there’s the part where Warhol is shot, nearly fatally. (The fact that Warhol survived is almost miraculous – he had to wear a surgical corset for the rest of life.) Myself, I wanted to know more about the motives (if any) of his would-be assassin, but this angle went unexplored. I then read that the woman who shot him was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and shot Warhol because he had apparently lost her copy of a play she wanted him to produce. The play was so vulgar that Warhol thought he was being set up for entrapment.
The documentary explores the men in Warhol’s life, particularly Jed Johnson and film executive John Gould. Warhol seems to have crafted an image of himself as a celibate (he was not) gay man, perhaps to appear non-threatening to the rich and powerful into whose circles he was invited. Warhol received many commissions from wealthy patrons for warholized images of themselves. (I decided that the man had sold out. My daughter Violet then pointed out that during the Renaissance, most artists made their living from rich patrons, so in that regard, he was in good company.)
In 1971, David Bowie met Warhol at the Factory (and would later play him in a film), but if this was mentioned, I sure missed it. The series says nothing about the song “Andy Warhol” from Bowie’s album “Hunky Dory” or what its subject thought of the song. I had to rely on Wikipedia to learn that Warhol apparently hated it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol_(song)
The later episodes deal with Warhol’s collaborations with graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the AIDS crisis of the 80s and Warhol’s death in 1987 after gall bladder surgery. The series would have made a great, say, three to five part series. Instead, it’s stretched over 7 episodes, but oddly, sometimes it’s what’s left out that’s puzzling (his aforementioned early career and the attempt on his life, for example.) I felt it could have been more tightly edited.
I didn’t come away knowing what made the guy tick, but that is not a fault of the documentary. Warhol emerges as a shy man who nevertheless sought the limelight, a profoundly lonely and a not particularly happy man. He is a study in contradictions – an artist whose work was too raw and too underground for the mainstream (discussing Warhol’s early films, John Waters, no stranger to controversy himself, points out “you’d go to prison for that.”) He hobnobbed with the wealthy and powerful. His pop art images were ubiquitous and made him a household name in the 1960s – decidedly not underground. I’m going to try to figure it all out over a bowl of Campbell’s soup…
de jungle 