What were they really like? In a biography of an artist, answering that question can be either an overt mission or a rumbling subtext. The Andy Warhol Diaries (Netflix), Andrew Rossi’s exhaustive six-parter based on Warhol’s own journal, chooses the former to an occasionally startling degree, but the work has already been chewed up and spat out a million times. Here is a long look at why a fallible human made it.
The show is based on Warhol’s own words, spoken to and transcribed by his friend Pat Hackett on a daily basis between 1976 and Warhol’s death in 1987, then published as a 1,200-page brick of intrigue in 1989. Episode one begins with an instruction to us not to take Warhol’s version of events on trust, which the programme precludes in any case via its rounded roster of contributors: as well as Warhol museum curators, other artists and simpatico cultural figures like Jerry Hall and John Waters, we hear from Warhol’s professional confidants and the loved ones of those closest to him. A man who strove to be unknowable becomes, partly by his own hand but mainly via the observations of others, known.
The picture constructed is an intensified version of an old story: that of the artist as an interested alien, a spectator who envies the players while better understanding the game. Andrew Warhola, the son of Austro-Hungarian immigrants from a poor part of conservative Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, relocates to New York and reinvents himself as both the boss of the Factory, a queer sanctuary at the avant garde end of the 1960s Manhattan art scene, and a wildly popular interpreter of commerce and celebrity’s vulgar iconographies. He is an outsider who craves mainstream acceptance, but whose art relies on standing outside it to see it clearly; a god of the underground art world whose obsession with the surfaces of celebrity puts him at constant risk of being dismissed as superficial.
The central point made by The Andy Warhol Diaries is the extent to which these tensions are created by Warhol’s sexuality, religion and self-image. As a gay Catholic who hates his own hair, skin and features – “I’m just a freak. I can’t change it. I’m too unusual” – he is revealed here as brittle and insecure in a personal life defined by three key relationships: the series gives over a whole episode each to Warhol’s lovers, Jed Johnson and Jon Gould, and to his friend and collaborator Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The Johnson story is the most rewarding, beginning in 1967 when he delivers a package to the building that is about to become the second iteration of the Factory and, deemed too handsome to work as a courier, is hired on the spot. His subsequent relationship with Warhol lasts for 12 years and has the classic contours of a doomed love between a volatile creative and the gentle companion who grounds them: as Warhol questions his own relevance in the 70s, Johnson flourishes as an interior designer with an eye for elegant luxury and access to famous clients. Eventually Johnson leaves his famous partner when Warhol’s interest in hardcore sex films and Studio 54 excess become unbearable.
Warhol almost immediately transfers his affection to Gould, a strapping, preppy, sweater-round-the-neck movie executive whose posh New England background and ability to pass for straight make him an avatar for many of the things Warhol craves. Clearly Gould’s importance to Warhol runs deeper than this and their love is real, but the contributor who can offer intimate insights about the relationship and its influence on Warhol’s work apparently does not exist. At this point, the show’s long running time and diligent treatment of the men in Warhol’s life as subjects in their own right start to feel indulgent.
There’s no such problem with the instalment on Basquiat, the emerging genius whose joint canvases with Warhol revitalise the older man’s creativity in the early 80s. Their flirty symbiosis, where who’s piggybacking on whose reputation – if indeed anyone is – remains disputed, raises hard questions about whether Warhol’s affinity with people of colour, both as fellow artists and subjects of his work, veers into exploitation. But the appreciation of their joint art is thrilling, bolstered by archive footage that is dreamily evocative of a century that feels inescapably more decadent, glamorous and ripe with potential than our own.
The last episode delivers an illuminating, heartfelt reappraisal of Warhol’s maligned final paintings, seeing them as his response to the Aids epidemic. Having lost Gould to Aids, Warhol is painfully invested in the calamity, not at all the disinterested voyeur suggested by his public facade. That was a false impression all along: this series shows that for Warhol, it was always personal.
