Inside Andy Warhol

Fame saved Andy Warhol. Lying in Columbus Hospital in New York City after being shot by Valerie Solanas, he was given up for dead, but when Mario Amaya, an art magazine editor, told the doctors that their patient was a famous artist, a specialist was brought in to revive him, giving him 19 more years of life—the years of Interviewmagazine, the cottage industry of commissioned portraits, and playing elder statesman to a new crop of pop artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Of course, fame saved Warhol in other ways too. Ric Burns’s new documentary, a part of PBS’s American Masters series airing tonight and tomorrow night at 9 p.m., documents the transformation of a poor, sickly mama’s boy, Andrew Warhola, into the silver-haired Factory impresario. The film is hagiography, and no doubt it would have pleased Warhol to be repeatedly described as “the most important artist of the second half of the twentieth century” (one talking head goes so far as to call him “the most important artist of the twentieth century,” putting him above Picasso). At first I scoffed. Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso? Besides a shared fondness for horizontally striped sweaters, the two hardly seemed to be equals; it was like elevating a hack onto a pedestal he didn’t deserve.

But on reflection, I think I was biased by two things. First, by the ubiquity of Warhol’s art. His work always seemed to be the punch line to describe a certain sort of person—just as a friend of mine once called an acquaintance “someone who would own a Monet umbrella.” Owning a Warhol mousepad or T-shirt seemed so obvious and not cool. No one, I thought, would still like Warhol. Being a Warhol fan was like being an angry teenager and thinking no one else had heard of the Velvet Underground. Warhol was passé.

Second, on seeing the film I realized that Warhol’s life was truly horrible. Like Warhol and everyone else who moves to New York, I had arrived in town with a vision of the city and the life I would lead here, and I think I imagined it to be a cross between one long George Plimpton soiree and an all-night rager at the Factory, a kind of celebrity-studded dance of people talking about art. (Plimpton, the other great party-thrower of the era, is a commentator in the film.) Watching Burns’s movie made me realize that going to the Factory would have involved sleeping in a tinfoil-lined bathroom and waking up to an orgy of meth and madness, making me wholly agree with Lou Reed, who said, “If you don’t want to die, you’ve got to be hip enough to be square.”

These two biases aside, I came to realize that the title Most Important Artist of the Past Fifty Years actually was valid for Warhol. The mousepads and tchotchkes that I mocked? They were a meta-extension of Warhol’s work, everyday American objects turned into art and then turned back into quotidian souvenirs. The ubiquity of his work? Merely a sign of his immense influence. Neither contemporaries like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns nor earlier Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko were ever able to penetrate the mainstream consciousness the way Warhol did. Only Jackson Pollock might have had a similar hold on pop culture, but even he is hardly as recognizable.

I went into the movie thinking I knew little about Warhol, and I came out realizing I knew lots, just by growing up in America. Through osmosis, I had absorbed the myth of Warhol—the mix of glamorous socialites and downtown drag queens at the Factory, the attempted assassination, the self-parodying style (he was willing to change the colors of his portraits in the 1970s to match his clients’ living rooms), and his big innovation, the elevation of American ordinariness to high art. Marcel Duchamp might have had his ready-mades, but Warhol took the banality of the American grocery store, with its cheap soups and garish movie-star fanzines, and blew it up.

The first part of the documentary, airing tonight, subtitled “Raggedy Andy,” explains the man behind the myth, following him from his childhood in Pittsburgh to the very beginning of the Factory years. When the camera zooms in on the altarpiece at the Catholic church where the young Warhol spent eight hours every week staring at the enlarged portraits of saints, it makes clear where he first got the idea of celebrity veneration. The second half of the documentary (airing tomorrow), “Drella” (a nickname for Andy that combined Dracula and Cinderella), covers much more familiar territory, and therefore you might find it less worth watching, depending on your interest in the Factory, drugs, Edie Sedgwick, sex, Nico, Valerie Solanas, and drag queens.

Warhol is important partly because he took art and fame and made them both seem easy. This might have earned him the scorn of critics, but it was an attitude that gave hope to every kid who hungered for the infamous fifteen minutes. Including the one I heard when I walked out of a showing at the Film Forum, in New York, saying, “Oh my god, oh my god! I don’t want to be an architect anymore! I want to be an artist! It just seemed so easy!” Warhol knew it wasn’t easy, but he worked very, very hard to make it look that way.