1950s

The 1950s recur in Andy Warhol’s diaries as both lived history and a later act of recollection. The decade appears first as the period when he carried a commercial artist’s portfolio around Manhattan and met people in advertising, publishing, and retail; years afterward, it returns through remembered neighborhoods, photographs, meals, and films. These glimpses do not form a comprehensive account of the decade. Instead, they show how particular places and images remained available to Warhol as measures of what had changed—and what still seemed familiar—in New York.

Manhattan as a working world

In the 1950s, Warhol worked long hours as a freelance commercial artist, drawing at home at night and taking his portfolio around Manhattan during the day. That routine brought him into contact with hundreds of people in advertising, publishing, and retail sales. Later, after he had left commercial art and become a Pop artist, he would jokingly call each person from that period the person who had given him his first job. The recurring joke turns a broad professional network into a comic, deliberately imprecise origin story: many people could claim a part in the beginning, without the diary sorting them into a definitive list of mentors or employers.

The decade’s professional connections also sit behind the later world of Warhol’s magazine, Interview. By 1976, the magazine’s growing circulation and glamorous reputation drew celebrities and new faces to its offices; its promise to feature someone in print had taken the place of the earlier promise of a role in a film. That later activity does not make Interview a product of the 1950s, but it sharpens the contrast between Warhol’s earlier work carrying a portfolio through the city and his later ability to gather people through a publication. The diary presents these as different means of making contact, linked by his continuing interest in the people who moved through commercial and cultural life.

Neighborhoods returned to in memory

In August 1982, walking through the East Village, Warhol noticed that it seemed to be picking up again and that its places were lit. Gem Spa was still there. The sight led him from the present neighborhood back to the 1950s, when he had lived on St. Mark’s Place. His recollection then moved forward into the 1960s, when he and his associates ran the Dom discotheque there, with the Velvet Underground and Nico playing. He also remembered going to psychedelic events at the Fillmore and eating at Ratner’s delicatessen. The walk gathered several periods into one route: the East Village of the 1950s, the activities of the 1960s, and the neighborhood he encountered again in 1982.

Warhol called the experience nostalgic, but the entry anchors that feeling in physical continuity. Gem Spa’s survival and the neighborhood’s renewed activity coexist with memories of earlier homes, music, and meals. The past is not presented as a fully reconstructed scene; it surfaces through what the walk prompts him to remember. His account moves quickly across decades, allowing a present-day street to act as a hinge between distinct phases of his life.

Photographs and the choice of a career

In 1984, Warhol saw an exhibition of photographs by Irving Penn, including pictures he remembered as the images that had helped draw him to New York in the first place. He found the photographs familiar rather than radically different from what he remembered, and noticed that the models appeared older—around thirty-five. One image remained especially vivid: a girl’s purse with its contents spilled out, including tranquilizer pills. The remembered photograph joined visual composition to specific objects, giving the exhibition the force of a return to an early encounter with photography.

That encounter also prompted Warhol to imagine a different career. He wondered whether he should have bought a camera when he first arrived in New York. Photography, he thought, had been wide open, and a picture of a famous person could provide a path to success. In that alternative version of his life, he imagined that he might be making television commercials. The entry does not establish what he would actually have done with a camera; it records a retrospective possibility, prompted by Penn’s work and by Warhol’s later understanding of the opportunities that photographs could create.

The decade as a shorthand for ordinary life

Later diary entries use the 1950s not only to recall Warhol’s own past but also as a comparison for the texture of everyday life. In 1985, a dinner in a large Los Angeles house included meatloaf, polenta, and bread pudding. Warhol remarked that it had been a long time since he had eaten that way—not since the 1950s, when people were poor. The hosts used a cookbook of recipes from the 1940s and 1950s, including Rice Krispies Squares. In this memory, the decade is associated with food and with an idea of economic circumstance; it is a personal comparison, not a general account of how everyone ate.

A different kind of retrospective scene came through Warhol’s viewing of Rebel Without a Cause. He described Sal Mineo as looking like a baby beside James Dean and Dennis Hopper, although the characters were supposed to be the same age. He noticed Dean’s jeans, Lacoste shirt, and red windbreaker, and recalled the scene in which Sal Mineo’s character rests his head on Dean’s stomach before Dean and Natalie Wood leave to be alone together. Warhol found the moment sad because the younger character was left without anyone. The film’s remembered image of youth and exclusion became another way the diaries revisited the past: not as a record of Warhol’s own 1950s experience, but as an older viewer’s reading of a film that continued to hold emotional force.

Together, these returns make the 1950s a flexible point of reference in the diaries. It is the decade of Warhol’s commercial-art routine and his early Manhattan connections, but it is also a past recovered through a walk, a photograph, a meal, or a movie. Each recollection has its own trigger and its own limits. Rather than supplying a single settled portrait of the era, the entries show how memories of it remained interwoven with later places, work, and acts of looking.