Andy Warhol had only been dead for two years when Warner books published "The Andy Warhol Diaries" in 1989.
It was a memoir that the Pittsburgh native and pop art legend dictated to his close friend and confidante, Pat Hackett, that served as a running monologue of what he was thinking and feeling during the last decade-plus of his life.
Thirty-three years after his memoir was made public, Netflix is taking that concept to a new level with its own version of "The Andy Warhol Diaries." The six-episode docuseries premiered Wednesday and takes a long, hard look at Warhol's life from his Pittsburgh roots all the way up to his 1987 death at age 58 due to cardiac arrhythmia after gallbladder surgery.
Even those who already have a solid grasp of Warhol's life story will find a lot to enjoy here thanks to footage and photos that exemplify the dichotomy between how Warhol's art satirized the concept of fame and his clear desire to remain in the center of culture.
"The Andy Warhol Diaires" also adds a unique wrinkle in that the diary entries are narrated by an AI re-creation of Warhol's voice. No matter how you feel about that choice, there's undeniable novelty to hearing Warhol's words read aloud by the man himself.
Though the diary entries run from 1976 through 1987, the docuseries starts with the artist's early days as Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh and features footage of his brothers and his mother. It also spends quite a bit of time at The Andy Warhol Museum on Pittsburgh's North Side interviewing some of the key figures tasked with keeping Warhol's legacy alive in his hometown.
Most Warhol retrospectives spend a lot of time on his 1950s and '60s ascension to New York City art royalty, when his studio known as "The Factory" drew artists of all stripes. However, "The Andy Warhol Diaries" speeds through that period and his near assassination by Valerie Solanas so it can more clearly focus on the era documented in the memoir.
There's plenty of time spent on some of Warhol's most iconic art pieces, but the series is much more focused on him as a character than his work. His paintings and other projects he either produced or was involved in are used to illustrate his psychology at certain moments throughout his career.
Much of Warhol's inner circle during his heyday are brought in for comment, as were celebrity admirers of his art and persona like John Waters and Rob Lowe. Director Andrew Rossi also made a point to interview some contemporary art critics to help contextualize his work, including a few BIPOC observers who helped frame Warhol's complicated personal and professional relationship with race.
Viewers who might have seen Warhol as a largely sexless figure will learn a lot about his long-term dalliances with Jed Johnson and Jon Gould, as well as his ambiguously defined friendship with fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Much of "The Andy Warhol Diaries" is spent explaining how those three men influenced Warhol on multiple levels, as well as what it was like for him to be a gay man at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Though the artificial Warhol voice can be off-putting, the re-creation is fairly close to the artist's flat vocal cadence. There's an unmistakable robotic element to it that may stray too far into the uncanny valley for some to reconcile. Warhol did, however, talk quite a bit throughout his life about wanting to one day become a machine. Maybe this is the sort of thing he would have appreciated.
There's a lot of content to sift through in the six-part series. The shortest episode is 52 minutes and the longest clocks in at 77 minutes, so know that completing this journey will require a significant time commitment. Some sections are definitely much less propulsive than others, but the sheer amount of visual documentation from 1970s and '80s New York City keeps it from ever growing too stale.
"The Andy Warhol Diaries" manages to distill a particularly chaotic time in both Warhol's life and American culture into a relatively succinct product that will spark as many questions about its subject as it answers. Even if it's impossible to truly understand a man of as many contradictions as Warhol, a docuseries like this brings us one step closer to unlocking the secrets of his mind.
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'THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES'
Rating: TV-MA (language, sex, nudity)
Where to watch: Premiered Wednesday on Netflix
