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Sep. 20--Forty years after Andy Warhol made his Campbell's soup cans, the public still can't decide whether he was a superficial scammer or a wry prophet. Many still see him as an emblem of decline, an unabashed entrepreneur who used art to further his fortune, a genius manipulator and public relations guru, a celebrant of society's obsessions with money, sex and celebrity.
Professional critics are more sympathetic, arguing that Warhol was an astute critic of commodity culture; that he helped revolutionize the process of art-making, rendering it more democratic and accessible to the masses; that he generated beautiful, and even moving, creations. Ric Burns' four-hour documentary, which airs tonight and tomorrow at 9 p.m. on WNET/13, unrelentingly pitches Warhol's brilliance, insisting that he was the most important artist of the 20th century's second half -- that he was, indeed, the postwar Picasso.
Well, was he? A procession of academics, critics and art-world insiders sprinkle their ponderous prattle with the word "genius," selling their subject as aggressively as Madison Avenue peddles beer. But the artists who continue to labor under his influence and who might make his case more convincingly are nowhere to be seen.
Written by Burns and James Sanders and solemnly narrated by Laurie Anderson, the documentary tells of Warhol's impoverished childhood in an immigrant quarter of Pittsburgh, his success in the 1950s as a commercial illustrator in New York, his rise to fine-art stardom in the 1960s, and his iconic reign at the Factory, the studio-cum-scene where celebs, debutantes and wanna-bes mingled with democratic, drug-addled abandon. The narrative is supplemented by testimonials to Warhol's skill by critics Dave Hickey and Wayne Koestenbaum, curator Donna De Salvo and art dealer Irving Blum, who let the odd gossipy tidbit drop amid scholarly bloviation.
Even a Warhol hagiography can't quite avoid the air of sordidness that clung to him, the mixture of worship and distance that characterized most of his relationships. Enthralled by the Truman Capote's epicene good looks, the young Warhol stalked the writer in the 1950s, but his feelings were never reciprocated. Later, he watched (and filmed) as the members of his entourage sank into addiction and despair. His disenchanted groupies nicknamed him Drella, a conflation of Dracula and Cinderella.
The documentary skims past some of the less inspiring chapters, such as the endless evenings he spent cozying up to celebrities at Studio 54. We hear from one acolyte of the Factory years, Billy Name (aka Billy Linich), whose idiosyncratic, vaguely wacked-out impressions enliven the show's sluggish hours. But Burns seems to have feared that the inclusion of too many brain-fried scene-sters might undermine the artist's bona fides. That's a shame: So much of Warhol's lasting appeal lay in those he gathered round himself, and firsthand accounts are always more vivid than secondhand appraisals.
Burns does a fair, if dull, job of explaining Warhol's importance, paying special attention to the rarely seen films he made with Edie Sedgwick, Ondine and his troupe of Factory irregulars. These, with their plotless meanderings and primitive techniques, now seem more radical than ever.
The narrative leads inexorably to Warhol's almost-death at the hands of Valerie Solanas, a disgruntled misfit who showed up at the Factory with a gun one day in 1968. Warhol's creativity never recovered, and though the critics tout the quality of the late work, the few short minutes devoted to it belie their claims. He left behind a little of everything, from the banal to the hypnotically poignant. He had his moments as a fawning hack, but he also proved a reluctant original. He deserved more than this trudging, deferential critique.
ANDY WARHOL: A Documentary Film. Directed by Ric Burns, it airs in two parts, tonight and tomorrow night at 9 on WNET/13.
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Copyright (c) 2006, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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