‘Andy Warhol Diaries’ tells a love story, not an art story
“The Andy Warhol Diaries,” a six-part documentary series now streaming on Netflix, is not the place to go for enlightening interpretation and analysis of the paintings of soup cans, celebrities, tabloid news and disaster crack-ups, not to mention the racy films, that made Andy Warhol (1928-1987) an international sensation .
Most of what the series has to say in that regard is standard stuff about the intersection of commercial mass media and art, which, frankly, often misses the actual point of his incisive Pop brand. Fervent claims about his art’s unmistakable significance are magnified by boilerplate promotional fluff from art dealers, museum curators and others that, at this late date, hardly needs to be repeated about one of the 20th century’s most important — and famous — artists.
Instead, the excellent reason to watch must be tagged to something else entirely. Rather than an art story, “The Andy Warhol Diaries” unfolds as a love story.
Or to be more precise, several love stories.
Interior designer Jed Johnson, Paramount Pictures executive Jon Gould, painter Jean-Michel Basquiat — Warhol was in love with all three. The varied, deeply felt relationships he had with them over nearly 20 years form the poignant spine of the narrative.
Homosexuality in cruelly heteronormative American society during the decades after World War II is the documentary’s subject, framed by Warhol’s successes and failures in love. The damage inflicted on any profound same-sex relationship that attempts to navigate repressive and punishing social obstacles is amplified by the artist’s cultural centrality and celebrity status.
“The Andy Warhol Diaries” is based on the hefty 1989 book of the same title edited by Pat Hackett, a longtime confidant of the artist and co-author with him of “Popism: The Warhol ’60s,” an inside account of his initial career. Netflix producer Ryan Murphy and co-executive producers Dan Braun, Josh Braun, Stacey Reiss, Stanley Buchthal and writer-director Andrew Rossi (“Page One: Inside the New York Times”) narrowed the story’s focus.
They drew on a vast trove of fascinating archival photographs and films, suitable for an artist emblematic of a blossoming media age, which gives the program an intimate, scrapbook-like feel.
One claim to Warhol’s lasting fame, after all, is his central role in removing the entrenched stigma around camera work as art, which he accomplished through the savvy use of photo silkscreens.
The core of the series’ six-and-a-half-hour running time is Warhol’s active romantic life. Not only did he have one, but also the conventional suppositions that he didn’t are themselves common symptoms of the puritanical public repressions around LGBTQ life.
Warhol was not asexual, as is often said. Deep emotional and intellectual attachments with men did not elude his grasp, despite a public persona that often seemed to be blank.
Culture, like nature, abhors a vacuum, though, which in Warhol’s blankness has filled up with market-oriented enthusiasms. By contrast, the documentary considers him within serious American social history.
The closet as a reaction to impediments to career advancement. Effeminacy and masculinity. The phenomenon of the open secret, in which “everybody knows but nobody says anything out loud.” The constricted identification made between gayness and sex.
“The Andy Warhol Diaries” opens with a remarkable look at the gritty Pittsburgh of the painter’s impoverished youth. The series then makes the surprising but wise decision to pretty much skip over the 1960s, in keeping with the book’s chronology. When it circles back to the groundbreaking art, it doesn’t have much of interest to say.
Yet, that flaw doesn’t much matter. What the documentary says about Warhol’s meaningful same-sex loves is revealing, and it’s also essential to know.