The 1968 shooting of Andy Warhol

The 1968 shooting of Andy Warhol was a near-fatal attack that divided his life into before and after. Recalled by Pat Hackett against the background of their first meeting later that year, the event appears not only as a medical crisis but as a lasting change in how Warhol understood his own survival.

The Attack and Its Context

In the autumn of 1968, Hackett met Warhol eight years after he had begun painting Pop art canvases and three months after he had been shot and nearly killed. The attacker was a woman who had appeared briefly in one of his underground films. By the time Hackett encountered him, Warhol had returned to the Factory, which had moved earlier that spring from its East 47th Street loft to a white-and-mirrored space on the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West.

Survival and the Hospital

The shooting brought Warhol close to death. In the hospital, just before doctors succeeded in reviving him, he was semi-conscious and heard them say that they thought he was gone. The account gives no further details of the attack; instead, it centers on the moment when Warhol became aware of how near he had come to dying and of what the doctors believed had happened.

The Aftermath at the Factory

When Hackett first worked near Warhol, his chest was still wrapped in surgical tape, and the wounds were healing. The physical aftereffects were visible in his movements and appearance, which initially struck Hackett as strange; his laughter, by contrast, could make that impression disappear. The episode places the attack’s consequences in the ordinary setting of the Factory, where Warhol sat near Hackett’s typewriter, read, and took calls while she transcribed.

A Life Understood as Returned

From June 1968 onward, Warhol considered himself a man who was officially back from the dead. The phrase captures the event’s enduring significance in Hackett’s account: survival was not merely the outcome of treatment, but a new description Warhol carried into his subsequent encounters. In the weeks after the shooting, friends who had not seen him since before the attack came to the Union Square loft to ask how he was feeling. His brief reassurances and occasional jokes took place against the knowledge that he had heard doctors mistake him for dead.