Andy Warhol: A Documentary

Ric Burns’s 4-hour, epic is a portrait of one of the 20th century’s most influential, controversial, and paradoxically mystifying artists. Warhol, born in 1928, died in 1987 at age 58. As a newcomer to New York in the 1950s, he worked in fashion and advertising, illustrating shoes for I. Miller. His earliest paintings, inspired by advertising, reproduced Campbell soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, Superman comics and other popular iconography. With peers Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Claes Oldenburg, Warhol pioneered the Pop Art Movement, conflating high and low culture. As a painter, filmmaker, author, world-class shopper and pop world personality, his enigmatic, irreverent style embraced junkies and socialites, waifs and sirens, hustlers and movie stars alike. Andy Warhol was a master image-maker. So it is fitting that Ric Burns should draw extensively on rare archival materials, many of them shot by Warhol himself, from the heyday of his fame in the ’60s and ‘70s. His superstars and proteges Edie Sedgwick, Viva, Ondine, Gerard Malanga and Candy Darling, among others, are all here larger than life. And then there are Warhol’s controversial screen-tests of such celebrities as Bob Dylan, Dennis Hopper, Susan Sontag, Salvador Dali and a host of others, recorded at his legendary Factory headquarters. Narrated by Laurie Anderson. There will be a fifteen minute intermission. Free admission.