Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film

In Paul Johnson's admittedly iconoclastic 2003 survey Art: A New History, Andy Warhol rates a single paragraph (Warhol is not only quoted as saying that “art is what you can get away with,” but held up as a textbook example). At four hours, Ric Burns' Andy Warhol, originally airing on PBS's American Masters series, obviously takes a different tack regarding Warhol's life and work. Unfortunately, where Johnson errs in being too dismissive, the interviewees here (primarily Warhol biographers and art collectors) are ridiculously effusive in their uncritical praise (even gushing over his early commercial hackwork for Glamour magazine). However, if you can get past the opening 15 minutes—a relentless hagiographical barrage of accolades—Andy Warhol truly excels in two areas: as biography and in its assessment of Warhol's impact (it's questionable whether—as the documentary claims—Warhol was the greatest artist of the second half of the 20th century, but he was definitely the greatest figure in art). Born Andrew Warhola (a typist left the final “a” off in his first published work and Warhol made no effort to correct it) on August 6, 1928, Warhol was a sickly kid struck with both rheumatic fever and St. Vitus' Dance, which left his skin with a patchy albino pigmentation. After taking art courses as a teenager, Warhol eventually moved to New York City in 1949, where he began doing commercial artwork (one of Warhol's signal achievements was to marry two activities—art and commerce—previously kept at arm's length), while trying to find his own style, one that would ultimately be heavily influenced by Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and perhaps most importantly, art curator/gadfly Henry Geldzahler, who steered Warhol toward his first major work: the 32 Campbell's Soup can portraits in 1962. The rest, as they say, is history, and it's a fairly fascinating history at that, as we see Warhol embracing silkscreen mass production of his art, creating the infamous “Factory” (a hangout for artistic types, drug addicts, and drag queens—often all one and the same), and switching his focus to art films such as Sleep (literally, a man sleeping for hours) and The Chelsea Girls. Warhol's world literally came crashing down in 1968, when he was shot by Valerie Solanas, and pronounced dead at the hospital, before being brought back to life after he was recognized by someone in the emergency ward. In some ways, a more open, humane Warhol—as opposed to the cryptic, cold persona the artist cultivated throughout the early and mid-‘60s—emerged after the shooting, and Warhol entered another highly productive period in the ‘80s, before dying from a botched gall bladder operation in 1987. Narrated by Laurie Anderson, and also featuring interviews with Warhol's brother John and the late George Plimpton, Andy Warhol combines solid narrative, so-so critical assessment, and excellent archival footage and stills to create an often mesmerizing, if too adulatory by half, portrait of the artist. Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)