WARHOL TONIGHT

Don't forget to tune into your local PBS station tonight for the Warhol special on the American Masters series. Here is what Ric Burns said about directing it:

Q: What interested you in the story of Andy Warhol?

A: The amazing thing about Warhol is that he was so successful at projecting an image of who he was that he actually mesmerized posterity. People have taken him at his word. "If you're looking for Andy Warhol," he once famously said, "don't look any further than the surface of my paintings or the surface of me. There's nothing behind there." There's nothing recherché about the story of Andy Warhol. It's there in print, in biographies, in letters, in paintings, and movies and friends and memories. If you walk behind the image that he created for himself, you discover one of the greatest stories in the history of art, in the history of American culture, a Horatio Alger story like nothing you've ever seen. There is not a person in America who cannot relate with their heart as well as their head to the rags-to-riches story of Andy Warhol, this kid with everything going against him in Pittsburgh - immigrant parents, in the Depression, growing up in two rooms with two older brothers, sleeping in the same bed with them, no indoor toilet, no radio, no hot or cold running water. Not a regular guy, clear to everybody but his mother from the start, small, frail, very bright, very vulnerable, incredibly shy, a host of childhood ailments culminating in St. Vitus dance when he was eight, which basically kind of put the kibosh on his schooling for a while.

He really had every challenge he possibly could have: a gay, dyslexic, poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks who grasped American culture as it came out of the ground in the 20th century more viscerally, more intuitively and more brilliantly than anybody before us and who came to New York, implausibly, in 1949, with $200 in his pocket, and 10 years later bought a townhouse on Lexington Avenue. He transformed himself into the most highly paid and most successful and well thought of commercial artist in America. At which point the story hadn't begun yet, at which point he still wasn't Andy Warhol, the Andy Warhol.

He really had every challenge he possibly could have: a gay, dyslexic, poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks who grasped American culture as it came out of the ground in the 20th century more viscerally, more intuitively and more brilliantly than anybody before us and who came to New York, implausibly, in 1949, with $200 in his pocket, and 10 years later bought a townhouse on Lexington Avenue. He transformed himself into the most highly paid and most successful and well thought of commercial artist in America. At which point the story hadn't begun yet, at which point he still wasn't Andy Warhol, the Andy Warhol.

He really had every challenge he possibly could have: a gay, dyslexic, poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks who grasped American culture as it came out of the ground in the 20th century more viscerally, more intuitively and more brilliantly than anybody before us and who came to New York, implausibly, in 1949, with $200 in his pocket, and 10 years later bought a townhouse on Lexington Avenue. He transformed himself into the most highly paid and most successful and well thought of commercial artist in America. At which point the story hadn't begun yet, at which point he still wasn't Andy Warhol, the Andy Warhol.

He really had every challenge he possibly could have: a gay, dyslexic, poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks who grasped American culture as it came out of the ground in the 20th century more viscerally, more intuitively and more brilliantly than anybody before us and who came to New York, implausibly, in 1949, with $200 in his pocket, and 10 years later bought a townhouse on Lexington Avenue. He transformed himself into the most highly paid and most successful and well thought of commercial artist in America. At which point the story hadn't begun yet, at which point he still wasn't Andy Warhol, the Andy Warhol.

Can't wait!