Who was the real Andy Warhol?

With his famous wig and shades, Warhol cultivated mysterious and mysterious persona. Now, a new exhibition with unprecedented access reveals the man behind the elaborate façade.

New exhibition in West Sussex, UK Andy Warhol: My true storyI don’t agree. The show, which spans 11 rooms at the Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, reveals the hidden depths of this important figure in pop art – peaked in the 1960s, attracting popular culture, advertising and mass media. It shows the bay between the artist’s public persona as a smooth pop icon and the highly shy and sensitive character, Private Andy. The family’s ephemera, early sketches unearthed from the archives, and intimate photographs that have never been shown all offer a new perspective to people who are as familiar as the Marilyn and Mona Lisa prints on display.

The show is curated by Professor Jean Wainwright (Andy later dropped “A”), a British art historian, Warhol’s world-renowned expert and longtime friend of the Warhol family. Ten years after Warhol’s death in 1987, Wainwright wrote his PhD on Warhol’s audiotape, travelling back and forth to his hometown in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, interviewing the artist’s inner circle, and passing through more than 2,000 cassette recordings of events Warhol performed, he had his personal thoughts. The Andy Warhol Foundation is currently under embargo on tapes from 50 years after his death (2037). That is, people can hear them, but they are not transcribed. Therefore, no one knows his content better than Wainwright. “I was given access in ways no one had before,” she told the BBC. “I got his true sense of what he is.”

He calls the name “Andy Warhol,” and a very specific image comes to mind: the lonely, easy-to-cool member of New York’s avant-garde art scene. Stylesetter wearing dark glasses, a leather jacket and a “terror” wig with spikes. He attracted the star signs to hedonistic gatherings in his studio, the factory. “We think he is a party animal and the epicenter of New York,” says Wainwright, but his research has changed as her research deepens. “I started listening to tapes and soon realized that he was such a multifaceted person with my family,” she said, describing herself as “the detectives are stitching things together.”

The biggest misconception about Warhol is keeping Wainwright and “that he didn’t care, and that he’s all about the surface.” A photograph of Gerald Maranga in 1971 is entitled Andy Warhol in a material moment at the factory, first exhibited at the museum. Take the day he learned it Valerie SolanasThe person who shot him in 1968 was released from prison, which portrays downcast Warhol with a look away from his eyes. Later in the exhibition, sketches from 1985/6 and laser sketches focusing on small areas of the torso demonstrate the deep physical and mental effects of the attack. A year later, he died of post-operative complications.

“In fact, he cared deeply,” Wainwright says. “He created himself for that character. [with wig and glasses]But beneath it there were so many human characteristics: self-doubt, worry, tension, embarrassment, anxiety – all these things that we don’t necessarily associate with Warhol. ” His diaryFor example, he was given the microphone at the studio’s 54th anniversary party in 1978, explaining that he could not clarify his thoughts in his speech.

Further clues to the actual, softer Warhol through the exhibition. Downstairs, a painting of a topless man from 1956 reclining a small heart flapping like a butterfly from his left hand. While on the second floor, his good humor is evident in the invisible 1965 Bob Adelman image. He laughs with wet Andy laughs as he pours water from his boots after being shoved into the pool by his actor and best friend Eddie Sedgwick.

Perhaps most surprising is the central role the family plays in the life of this cult figure, conveyed at the exhibition through private artefacts. Postcards written to the mother from an exotic place revealing that each of them is “I’m fine” or “I’m fine”, and that he is the uncle of an uncle who jokes like an uncle who jokes like a child’s joke. “We loved visiting him in New York,” his nie, Madaren Warhola, says on one of the tapes. “His townhouse was never a land [with] Lots of robots, lots of candies, toys, lots of bazooka bubble gum. ”

For a well-known artist, Warhol’s private life was surprisingly domestic. His widowed mother Julia had lived with him since 1952, with heritage throughout the exhibition. She moved from what is now East Slovakia, where the two spoke together about her hometown of Russin, and were regular attendees in the Catholic Church. Her footage of Warhol in 1966 offers a rare glimpse into their home. The washing that accumulates in kitchen sinks, net curtains, and chipped paint is a far cry from the luxury lifestyle we might imagine.

Due to his tendency to “facades of smoke and mullah” and “put another kind of image into the world,” Wainwright says, few people will know this side of him. Talk to the BBC In 2019, Eric Sinner, former director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, described him as a “great artistic dodger” who enjoyed sharing misleading information. “He really liked to take people out of the scent,” he continues. “When asked where he was born, he sometimes says Cleveland, sometimes says Buffalo.

The photographer also mentioned this elusive quality. “When I was filming him, I felt like I was chasing smoke.” recall David Bailey in 2019 features the rarely seen Warhol Hallway (1973) on the show. “It’s right in front of you, you can see it, but when you reach out to grab it, it disperses and disappears.”

As for his impressive look, it was smoke and mirror too. It not only hid his anxiety (hair thinning and eye contact requirements), but also helped to manufacture his distinctive brand. “He learned how to make himself memorable from the film,” Wainwright said, and he created himself into something “instantly recognizable” like his own soup can.

He was also hiding behind Pithy Soundbites, but it was said that even some of these, including the first “surface” quote, had been given to him by others. In many cases, he intentionally allowed others to construct an image of themselves on his behalf. “It’s very empty today. I can’t think of anything.” He told the interviewer 1966. The following year he hired an actor. Allen Midget Impersonate him on the event: The clever acts of performance art and promotion have separated the quiet and modest Warhol from his unpleasant, famous identity.

His glittering aides were the ideal way to distract him from himself and build his myth. With a strange look Merv Griffin Show in 1965Eddie Sedgwick became his mouthpiece. “Andy doesn’t say words,” she warned the presenter. “If you ask him a question, he whispers the answer to me.” It was a ploy that added to the artist’s mysticity, while providing a handy solution to his embarrassment.

The abundant recordings he made with a tape recorder also played a role in the fact that he was called his “wife.” “He wanted to hear someone else talk, so he doesn’t have to talk about himself,” his brother, John Walla, told Wainwright. “We consider him to be a pop artist, but he was mostly an anthropologist,” Wainwright says. “He was at the party, but he was a quiet epicenter and things are happening around him,” as photographer Billy Name told her in 2001, “He wasn’t a cultural hero like Cultural Zero. You can get through him.”

In a room dedicated to Warhol’s Silver Factory period in the mid-1960s, when he manages a band, a velvet underground, we see him staring at his camera or hiding under his arms, hoping it will catch you before it catches him. The predatory way Warhol protects those around him was described by factory resident photographer Nat Finkelstein as “a black widow spider.” “He consumed people like he consumed pizza,” he told Wainwright in a 2002 interview. “He sucked on the top and dumped the rest.”

But in this section of the show it’s a Photo by Bob Adelman Since 1965, most people have been remembering. Surrounded by portrait lighting, it is Warhol in the spotlight. His naked face, which is not in his sunglasses, wears an uneasy, revealing expression. The seated person is inconspicuous and barely recognisable. Andy Warhol, without his aides or trinkets.