In The Andy Warhol Diaries, a new six-episode Netflix documentary executive-produced by Ryan Murphy, the familiar details of the artist’s life are mostly covered within the first hour. There’s his tortured youth in Pittsburgh, where he drew portraits of his fellow schoolmates in attempts to stop their bullying; his early fondness for Campbell’s tomato soup; and his eventual escape to New York in 1949, at the age of 20. There, after transitioning from graphic design to fine art, he launches The Factory, his storied and sometimes exploitative studio in Union Square; he exhibits his first soup cans in 1962 and, by 1968, reaches pop stardom.
Director Andrew Rossi’s focus, however, is mainly on the inner life Warhol painstakingly hid from view, namely the artist’s fraught relationship with his own homosexuality. “I grew up to understand my sexuality as a bisexual man in a very homophobic environment, and so he was a hero, always,” Rossi tells the Guardian, “but I never knew the details of his life.” In his reading of the original Andy Warhol Diaries, the artist’s titular memoir published in 1989, what he found was “not just a manipulative monster, or a happy fool, but rather a humanity that plays out in these very beautiful and intense romantic relationships”.
