Andy Warhol left behind many self-portraits.
There was the black-and-white shot of a photo booth comic, from 1963, in which he wore dark blacks and a cool expression. In 1981, he took a Polaroid of himself in drag, with a platinum blonde bob and bold red lips. Five years later, he printed his face with bright red acrylic paint on a black background. These and other depictions of the Pop Art master are among his most famous works.
But one of his most telling self-portraits was not a portrait at all, in the conventional sense. Between 1976 and 1987, the artist regularly dictated his thoughts, fears, feelings and opinions – about art, himself and his world – over the telephone to his friend and collaborator Pat Hackett. In 1989, two years after his death, Hackett published ‘The Andy Warhol Diaries’, a transcribed, edited and abridged version of their telephone conversations.
And now, more than three decades later, “The Andy Warhol Diaries” has come to Netflix as a bittersweet documentary series directed by Andrew Rossi. In a video interview, the director pointed out that Warhol planned to publish the book after his death.
“Looks like there’s a message that he may not have even understood himself,” Rossi said. “There is an open invitation to interpret it as with any of his works of art – because I see the diaries as another self-portrait in his body of work.”
Warhol’s cultural prominence has hardly waned in the decades since his death in 1987. His fascination with branding and celebrity, as well as the famous saying often attributed to him – “in the future everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes” – are possibly even more relevant in the age of social media and reality TV.
“There’s a reason ‘Warholian’ remains a description,” Rossi said. “He is one of the few artists who has transcended his personality and become part of the language and cultural fabric.”
But if Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, it’s because he is — on screen, on stage, in museums, and on the street. Earlier this month, Ryan Raftery returned to Joe’s Pub with the biting biomusical “The Trial of Andy Warhol”. Anthony McCarten’s new London play, ‘The Collaboration’, which centers on the relationship between Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, is already being adapted for the big screen. The exhibition ‘Andy Warhol: Revelation’ at the Brooklyn Museum examines his Catholic upbringing. And starting Friday, Bated Breath Theater Company will be bringing the theatrical walking tour production “Chasing Andy Warhol” to the streets of the East Village.
Together, the works create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human being under the white wig. Even as he created an indelible, internationally known identity, this child of Carpatho Rusyn immigrants, Ondrej and Julia Warhola, struggled with his faith (Byzantine Catholic) and his sexual orientation (gay, but never as out as many of his contemporaries) – areas that explore both “The Andy Warhol Diaries” and “Andy Warhol: Revelation” in particular.
A significant portion of the Netflix series explores Warhol’s romantic relationships. It explores Warhol’s struggle to show his love for his first long-term partner, an interior designer named Jed Johnson. Later comes preppy Paramount director Jon Gould, who was showered with affection by Warhol but eventually died of AIDS.
Jessica Beck, curator of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, was interviewed in the documentary series. Rossi found her through her work at the Whitney Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again” in 2018, for which she wrote an essay entitled “Warhol’s Confession: Love, Faith and AIDS.”
“There are times when he doubts himself, when he wonders what it’s like to be successful, what it’s like to get older, what it’s like to be in love,” she said. “That’s one of the strengths of what the series reveals is that there’s a human behind this mythical story.”
Beck pointed to pieces from Warhol’s “Last Supper” series, some of which are currently featured in “Andy Warhol: Revelation.” In particular, she referred to a painting, “The Last Supper (Be a Somebody With a Body)”, which combines an image of Jesus Christ with that of a bodybuilder, a symbol of health and masculinity. Beck said the work reflects Warhol’s responses to the AIDS epidemic.
“When you put these two things side by side, you have this real expression of ideas about grief and suffering, but also about forgiveness,” she said.
“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” which opened in November and will run through June 19, is divided into seven sections that take visitors to the artist’s immigrant education and the roots of his religion through the various phases of his life and career, with a particular focus on the tension between his faith and his queer identity.
“This goes beyond soup cans and Marilyn,” said José Carlos Diaz, the chief curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, referring to some of Warhol’s Pop Art hits. Diaz first put on “Revelation” at the Warhol Museum before taking it to Brooklyn.
Carmen Hermo, associate curator of the Brooklyn Museum, organized the New York presentation of ‘Revelation’. Both she and Diaz are the children of immigrants, like Warhol, and she speculated that this part of the artist’s background helped explain his famous work ethic and fierce drive to create the best version of himself.
Diaz said, “For me, he’s living the American dream,” adding that more nuanced, recognizable perspectives on the artist ultimately “surpassed this mythological Warhol with the big glasses, the big wig.”
Across the East River, Mara Lieberman, the Executive Artistic Director of Bated Breath Theater Company, uses her quite a few glasses and wigs. Starting Friday, Lieberman will direct “Chasing Andy Warhol,” a theatrical tour of the East Village in which multiple actors play the performer simultaneously, alluding to his love of repeated imagery and different personas.
One scene shows something that happened during a trip Warhol took to Hawaii with the production designer Charles Lisanby, whom he was in love with at the time. A few days after arriving at the hotel, Lisanby brought another man back to the room, and Warhol exploded and was injured – an event described in the artist’s biographies.
Warhol has said he later realized the power of saying “whatever” in response to painful life events, an insight he detailed in his book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” It is, Lieberman said, “his biggest coping strategy.”
This attitude was a key ingredient — along with his ideas of identity, technology, celebrity and more — in Warhol’s “highly stylized, constructed, brilliantly strategized brand,” Lieberman said.
“Andy liked to take life and put a frame around it and say, ‘Look, that’s art,'” she said. “We go out on the streets of New York, frame things and say, ‘Look, that’s art.'”