Andy Warhol: My True Story, the summer show at Newlands House Gallery, is a humanising portrait of one of Modern Art’s most sacred monsters. Curated by the art historian and critic Professor Jean Wainwright, it goes behind the fright wig and dark glasses of Warhol’s crafted persona to discover Uncle Andy, the family man, dog and cat lover, and home movie maker. Yes, he likes to fashion surreal alter-worlds in his Factory and to Pop Art-world pretensions with a Campbell’s Soup can opener. But he’s also a guy who likes to goof around with his friends.
Warhol claimed, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” But, says Wainwright, he was anything but surface. A profoundly complex man, the public identity he created “was a dance between what he allowed to be known and what he hid behind, both his protective shield and an intuitive marketing strategy.”
More a biography than an art exhibition, the show features memorabilia and archive material from Warhol’s close family and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York. As both a family friend and an academic researcher, Wainwright has had rare access, and the show includes drawings, photos, film, and audio that have never previously been available to the British public.
From Andrew Warhola’s birth in 1928 into a working-class Carpatho-Rusyn-immigrant home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Andy Warhol’s death from surgical complications in 1987, Wainwright tells the story in a series of vignettes of his life and art: childhood and early drawings (some shown for the first time); commercial artist (shoe ads that a foot fetishist might die for); flower painter, adorer of angels and Barbie dolls; admirer of Mona Lisa, money and robots (he said he wanted to be one, built an “Andybot” as a would-be understudy); metamorphosed master of the revels for New York’s celebrity pop counterculture; obsessive observer of daily acts and chatter; lover and provocateur, haunted by intimations of mortality after his near-fatal shooting by a radical feminist stalker.
There are photo portraits by Warhol of his sad-eyed muse and superstar, poor-little-rich-girl Edie Sedgewick, shortly before her suicide and a blank-eyed muse, the actress-singer Nico with Lou Reed and the rest of the Velvet Underground/ Exploding Plastic Inevitable gang.
There are tributes to Warhol from a younger generation of artists that he influenced, including Rob and Nick Carter, Philip Colbert, and a Gavin Turk self-portrait disguised in Warhol character and wig.
The show ends with a home movie of his mother cooking in the kitchen, accompanied by one of his boyfriends/lovers in tow.
What there isn’t is much in the way of critique. This is a Warhol-friendly show, and there’s no risk of damage to his reputation from friendly fire.
By intention, says Wainwright, who tells Artlyst that one of her aims is to offer an alternative approach, focusing on Warhol, the Man, as a counterpoint to the retrospective survey of his art, Andy Warhol Portrait of America, currently on display at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes until 29 June 2025.
Andy Warhol: My True Story, Newlands House Gallery, Petworth, Sussex, 6 June -14 September 2025