1960s

The 1960s recur in the diaries as a past that never stays past. The decade begins in concrete places and work—the Factory, films, and a new magazine—but returns decades later through remembered collaborators, surviving objects, repeated styles, and the uneasy question of who will belong to the future. For Andy Warhol, the sixties are at once a formative artistic era, a social world that can be revisited, and a measure against which the present is repeatedly judged.

A decade built around the Factory

Warhol’s first meeting with the diary’s narrator took place in autumn 1968, eight years after he had painted his first Pop canvases and only three months after a woman who briefly appeared in one of his underground films had shot and nearly killed him. The Factory had moved that spring from its original silvered loft on East 47th Street to a white-and-mirrored sixth-floor space at 33 Union Square West. The recalled decade is thus not introduced as an abstract cultural label: it is anchored in a changed studio, an altered working life, and the immediate aftermath of a crisis.

From 1968 to 1972, the Factory’s major activity was making feature-length 16mm films for commercial release, with the films enlarged to 35mm. People who gathered at Max’s Kansas City or came to the Factory hoping to be discovered formed a changing cast. During the summer of 1968, while Warhol was recovering at home, Paul Morrissey made Flesh, starring the Factory receptionist and bouncer Joe Dallesandro. The film began a long commercial run at the Garrick Theater that autumn. This shift—from Warhol’s earlier Factory films to Morrissey’s independent production—shows the sixties as a collective work environment whose activity could continue even when its central artist was absent.

The same practical, incremental spirit shaped Interview. When Warhol decided to start the magazine in 1969, he wanted it oriented toward movies, with stars speaking in their own words and, where possible, interviewing one another. He favored starting on a small budget, financing the early operation himself, and building gradually so that a later successful business would not leave ownership primarily with a backer. A first-issue legal problem made that economy tangible: an objectionable description of a film critic had already gone to press before a lawyer advised that the wording could be libelous. The episode connects the magazine’s experimental editorial idea to the imperfect, resource-conscious means by which it began.

From discovery to celebrity production

By 1976, Interview had developed a glamorous, knowingly self-mocking identity, and celebrities wanted to appear in it. The promise of being put in the magazine had displaced the earlier promise of being put in a movie. Its pages gave unfamiliar young men and women a first appearance in print, while Warhol and staff members kept finding people to fill each issue. The change records an important afterlife of the Factory: discovery continued, but the medium and the machinery of visibility had changed.

Warhol’s portrait practice likewise turned celebrity into a deliberate production sequence. He took about sixty photographs of a subject with a Polaroid Big Shot, selected four, and sent them to a screen printer to make positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetates. He chose and cropped one image, altered its features to make the subject appear more attractive, and had the result enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate for silkscreening. Assistants prepared canvas rolls in different flesh-toned backgrounds for male and female portraits; Warhol transferred the image, painted selected colors, and aligned the silkscreen with them. Small shifts in registration created the portraits’ characteristic shifting effect. The first canvas generally cost about $25,000, with additional canvases about $5,000 each. In these later procedures, the decade’s interest in famous faces survives as both an artistic method and a carefully priced service.

The diaries also preserve tensions within the social world that surrounded art and fashion. Warhol admired fame, beauty, talent, originality, nerve, good conversation, and especially established American wealth, yet European titles did not impress him and he often pronounced them incorrectly. His recollections of the period’s people and styles are therefore not simply a record of admiration: they show a particular system of attention, one that prized visibility and achievement while treating some inherited markers of status with indifference.

The past returning in objects and encounters

When Warhol looked back at a party, he could encounter the sixties in the form of a work whose value had changed. A Marilyn portfolio he had given Joyce Haber after her article about him in the Los Angeles Times was reportedly mildewing in her basement; a poster he had given Rona Barrett had passed to another owner. He remembered giving Haber the portfolio during a difficult moment in her life, before he knew how valuable such works would become. The story joins a personal gift to the later art market: a remembered gesture acquires a new meaning when the object becomes expensive.

People and clothes carried a similar persistence. At a party, Warhol saw Ultra Violet wearing a dress and gold coins associated with the sixties; the coins’ changed value made the familiar look seem newly precarious. Elsewhere, he remembered photographs he had taken of April Axton in the decade and noted that they were now worth $1,000. These encounters register the passage of time through things that remain visible—garments, jewelry, photographs—while their owners, prices, and social meanings change around them.

The Factory’s earlier circle also resurfaced through exhibitions and chance meetings. A caption recalling Warhol at his 1971 Whitney retrospective placed him among Geraldine Smith, Ultra Violet, Andrea Feldman, Jane Forth, and Donna Jordan. Other retrospective captions recalled Mary Woronov’s appearance in Chelsea Girls, Nico’s singing with the Velvet Underground, and International Velvet as a Warhol Girl of the Year; another identified Viva and Brigid Berlin in Tub Girls. Photographs from the set of Flesh showed Jackie Curtis, Dallesandro, and Geri Miller. Together, these recollections make the sixties legible as a network of films, performers, and images—not a single unified scene, but a body of work and association that later captions and memories could assemble again.

Nostalgia, repetition, and the problem of a new decade

A walk through the East Village brought the decade back through changing streets and surviving landmarks. Gem Spa was still there, and Warhol remembered living on St. Mark’s Place in the 1950s, then running The Dom with the Velvet Underground and Nico in the sixties, going to psychedelic events at the Fillmore, and eating at Ratner’s delicatessen. The walk made him feel nostalgic: the places joined separate periods of his life, while the remembered venues and routines gave the neighborhood a temporal map.

A new art opening could produce the opposite response, making the sixties seem less like a place to revisit than a style being revived. At the Whitney Biennial, Warhol thought the exhibition was like the sixties; he also noted the success of Keith Haring and the rapid sales of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Los Angeles show. At another opening, René Ricard greeted him as someone he had been seeing everywhere from the sixties into the eighties. The apparent return of the earlier decade was therefore mixed with a changed generation of artists and a new market. Warhol’s question of what would last became explicit in his view that, five years into a decade, observers begin sorting its people into those who will belong to the future and those who will become part of the past.

Flowers offered a more private version of that temporal return. While painting commissioned Flowers during sweltering weather, Warhol experienced a flashback to 1964: the same images, heat, and mood as when he first made them. His screen printer Rupert Smith did not share that response, but Warhol did, and he considered adding diamond dust to make the new works different. The episode holds repetition and alteration together. A familiar image can reactivate an earlier moment, yet the commission still demands a new treatment rather than a simple return.

Other memories measured what the decade had set in motion. Watching a skating film, Warhol reflected that skating had been popular in the early 1940s and had later died out, then widened the thought to the disappearance of cultural enthusiasms. Looking at Irving Penn’s photographs, he remembered the images that had helped bring him to New York and wondered whether he might have become a photographer had he bought a camera when he first arrived. The thought did not revise his actual career; it briefly exposed an unrealized route beside it.

The past as personal history and unfinished business

Some of the decade’s strongest returns were attached to regret. At a museum event, Warhol saw Bettie Barnes, whom he blamed for the death of a cat he had given her in the early 1960s. He remembered that, after the kitten cried, he had given Barnes its mother too; the mother later died during a spaying operation. He had felt guilty ever since and suggested that the story belonged at the beginning of Popism. Here the past is not a glamorous inventory. It is a small domestic memory that continues to organize guilt and even his sense of where a history of the era might begin.

Warhol also encountered old work in new settings. At a Detroit museum book signing, a man from a wedding in the sixties brought an advertisement and an old Velvet Underground cover signed by the band, apparently missing Lou Reed’s signature. Warhol noticed how much his own signature had changed: he had signed with a ballpoint pen then, used pencil for Mick Jagger portraits, and later adopted felt-tip pens. The artifact made personal change visible alongside the survival of the earlier group’s image.

The people themselves could reappear in altered circumstances. Warhol heard that Ondine, who had once borrowed films including Loves of Ondine and Chelsea Girls without returning them, was selling hot dogs at Madison Square Garden. He also heard that Gerard Malanga had become an archivist for the Parks Department, questioned Malanga’s stated age, and remarked that a recent photograph made him look good. A separate recollection placed Warhol’s meeting with Dennis Hopper during the filming of a Naked City episode, when Henry Geldzahler had taken him to the East Side location. These details resist a clean division between a legendary past and an ordinary present: former performers and collaborators continue into new jobs, appearances, and stories.

The prospect of a screen project based on Warhol’s life made the decade a subject for negotiation. When a producer proposed interweaving several stories about the sixties, Warhol pointed out that a film about the period already existed and suggested acquiring the rights to Popism instead, with himself and Fred Hughes as consultants and Paul Morrissey writing the script. The proposal shows him treating the past not only as memory but as material whose representation, rights, and compensation mattered.

Yet not every return was welcome. Billy Name called from Poughkeepsie while organizing a sixties reunion, describing plans involving Gerard Malanga, Ingrid Superstar, and a visit to Stephen Shore’s house. Warhol felt he could not face the past. The refusal gives the article’s recurring nostalgia a limit: memory can be affectionate, commercially useful, or triggered by a street or photograph, but a reunion would require re-entering a world he was not prepared to revisit. Even a contemporary concern about photographs at the Interview office could prompt the apprehension that it might be the sixties all over again. Across these returns, the decade remains less a settled historical period than a living comparison—one that Warhol invokes, reworks, and sometimes declines to enter.