Using Warhol's own words to re-examine his biography, writer-director Andrew Rossi's Netflix docu-series peels away the layers of the artist's public persona to examine how his personal life influenced the art that changed American culture forever.
“I grew up in New York City, and Andy Warhol and his artwork loomed large in my imagination,” Rossi tells. “The diaries felt like a critical pathway to understanding the man behind the myth. It was almost a work of literature that I thought could be decoded, and that Andy as a character would emerge throughout the course of the 1,000 pages.”
The characters that also emerged from the diary pages were those of interior designer Jed Johnson and Paramount executive Jon Gould, two men with whom Warhol had vital romantic relationships during his life. “The biggest myth [that’s] perpetuated is that Warhol was asexual,” says Jessica Beck, Milton Fine Curator of Art at the Andy Warhol Museum and whose scholarship on Warhol’s personal life and its relationship to his work provided additional analytical context for Rossi.
Yet there are many in the Warhol world — both Warhol scholars and his personal acquaintances — who diminish or simply ignore his queerness in a public fashion. “It’s the great paradox that Andy was out in some ways, and yet wasn’t personally perceived as someone existing in a queer space,” Rossi continues.
Warhol’s most popular pieces, themselves replications of pop-culture imagery, include the ubiquitous depictions of the likes of Marilyn Monroe and the Campbell’s soup cans. But his own struggles with desire and sexuality — particularly during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, during which the Catholic Church in which he was raised played a role in antagonizing and demonizing those affected by the epidemic — are present in his work from the era.
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