What was Andy Warhol really like? The Newlands House Gallery exhibition shows the artist like never before

Andy Warhol lied. He liked to describe himself as ‘a deeply superficial person’, but the exhibition opening later this week at Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, West Sussex, shows the many layers behind this public persona. Curated by Jean Wainwright, who has spent some 30 years researching the artist, ‘Andy Warhol: My True Story’ distils her findings through both artworks and photographs — including a spectacular shot taken by Bob Adelman, showing the artist pouring water out of his boots after his muse Edie Sedgwick had pushed him into a swimming pool at a party in New York in 1965.

Perhaps most touchingly, however, the exhibition shines the spotlight on Warhol’s close relationship with his mother, Julia Warhola. A talented calligrapher, she often lettered her son’s illustrations—most famously in 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, a privately published book of lithographs inspired by the feline colony she kept at their New York apartment (where she had moved from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, about a decade after the death of the artist’s father).

Warhola, who, like her husband, originally hailed from what is now Slovakia, always spoke to her children in her native Rusyn, an East Slavic language similar to Ukrainian. Yet, when Warhol filmed her for his 1966 The George Hamilton Story (Mrs Warhol), she acted in broken, very accented English. Earlier that year, she had appeared in Esquire as part of a feature on mothers of famous sons and the magazine had kept her original way of expressing herself intact. This initially ‘caused consternation in the Warhol household,’ according to Elaine Rusinko’s Andy and Julia in Rusyn: Warhol’s translation of his mother in film and video, but it may later have alerted the artist ‘to the creative potential of Julia’s speech style’, resulting in his decision to cast her in The George Hamilton Story.

It was the screen debut for the ‘very sweet old lady’, as the artist’s friend Susan Pile, who doubled up as sound tech for the film, described her in one of her letters. Warhol would go on to film his mother again, this time speaking Rusyn, in videos that are full of love for her son — but also complaints about a perm gone bad.

Warhola died in 1972, a year after the artist had sent her back to Pennsylvania because she had suffered a stroke and he couldn’t look after her properly. Warhol struggled with a sense of guilt for that decision and he kept her death secret for a long time.