Along with explicitly informing quite a bit of his work, including the homoerotic Sex Parts series and various explorations of gender, it helped shape his worldview as the slight, artistic son of Eastern European immigrants, growing up in a rough working-class part of Pittsburgh. Yet in Rossi’s telling, sexuality is the key to understanding who he really was. For those who knew or study the artist, this isn’t new information. Although often depicted as asexual or at least celibate-an impression he helped to manufacture-Warhol was a gay man who had infatuations, romances, even live-in boyfriends. The Jon he’s referring to is Jon Gould, a Paramount executive who was one of Warhol’s great loves.
I’d rather be a machine, wouldn’t you?”) “I’ve got these desperate feelings that nothing means anything,” the computerized Andy drones, quoting a diary entry from 1981. (Perhaps to preempt the kind of criticism the makers of a recent Anthony Bourdain film faced for simulating their subject’s voice, Rossi notes this choice at the beginning of the doc and quotes a Warholism: “Machines have less problems. Throughout six episodes that range from around 50 to nearly 80 minutes but rarely feel excessive, an AI simulation of Warhol’s voice reads some of the most revealing passages from the diary. That private side is the focus of the sprawling, brilliantly executed Netflix docuseries The Andy Warhol Diaries, from director Andrew Rossi ( Page One: Inside The New York Times) and executive producer Ryan Murphy.įramed by the daily journal entries that Warhol dictated to writer Pat Hackett during the final decade of his life, which were posthumously published in edited form, the series offers perhaps the most intimate view of the 20th century’s most ubiquitous artist that has ever been seen on screen.
Beyond the obfuscation, there is a personality, a perspective, and, most of the time, a constellation of authentic interpersonal relationships. I want to be plastic.”īut just because an artist denies the public access to their interiority, doesn’t mean they are unknowable. Certainly, the artist played that part to the hilt, constantly appearing in public with an expression of glassy-eyed enchantment and some faux-naive musings to dispense in a breathless near-monotone: “I love Los Angeles. But given how eagerly this exhibition wants to change the conversation about Warhol, it seems odd to limit the nonpaying public to his most transactional and perhaps cynical work.Among his fans as well as his critics, the image of Warhol as an impenetrable enigma has persisted for as long as he’s been a household name, from his Pop heyday in the 1960s to his untimely death in 1987, all the way up through the present. He called them “business art,” and the money he earned from them helped subsidize some of his less lucrative ventures. Gorman, painter of sentimental Native American scenes), underscores the pragmatic role they played in Warhol’s business model. They are hung salon style, floor to ceiling, and the number of them, as well as the wildly eclectic variety of their subjects (including the shah of Iran and R.C. And the museum has devoted one gallery on the ground floor, which is accessible to the public without paying the $25 admission, to Warhol’s portraits. This seems a concession to the same homophobia that made Warhol circulate these images privately. A series of sexually explicit images - a 1979 portfolio titled “Sex Parts” - is discreetly placed on the side of a large wall panel and easily missed. A couple of curatorial decisions at the Whitney tend to reinforce reflexive thinking about Warhol.