The exhibition contains many familiar Warhol art works: aside from the films and four-minute “screen tests” (1964–66) there are paintings and screenprints. Other content is less familiar: a selection of videos dating from the mid-60s, graphic art and illustration, artist’s books and the first copy of the magazine that became Andy Warhol’s Interview. This emphasis on the artist’s versatility and the ease with which he crossed the line between commercial art and the fine arts, demonstrates better than any rhetoric Warhol’s challenge to art historians.

More interestingly, the exhibition takes advantage of the curator’s access to the extensive Warhol archive in Pittsburgh to include much material about Warhol’s life. Some of the material is diaristic – such as flyers for exhibitions, press clippings, scribbled phone messages and such like that Warhol habitually boxed into his “time capsules”. The contents of TC 61 are dispassionately arranged inside a glass box, conforming to the current taste for the archival. Among such ephemera are items of great significance and emotive power in the work and life of Warhol: for instance two postcards sent to the artist by Valeria Solanas five months before she shot Warhol in June 1968. The refusal to create a hierarchy for these or any other items observes the Warholian maxim: “all is pretty”.

It encompasses the type of biographical fragments you would expect to find in a posthumous survey – such as childhood snapshots and mementos (a sunny studio photograph of Shirley Temple signed: “To Andrew Warhola from Shirley Temple”). A section called A Biography in 50 Pictures, compiled from public and private sources, provides a timeline that takes us from Pittsburgh in 1928 to New York in 1987, the year of Warhol’s unexpected death. Images mark Warhol’s progress up the social ladder from shy commercial illustrator to fine artist (the “personality” of the late 80s poses in an advert to promote a bank and is caught in the flashlight with jazz musician, Miles Davis). The section is supplemented by, more “psychological” photographs to suggest a convergence between Warhol’s life and his art. A rare contact sheet of 1955 records the young Warhol striking a series of theatrical poses as if in search of his photogenic self. Unusually for a person who was sensitive about his physical appearance (Hubertus Butin’s essay records that Warhol had plastic surgery as early as 1956 to “improve” his nose), Warhol was addicted to the lens but moreover understood its dark powers. The display includes the cover of the New York Times (June 4 1968) with its headline “Andy Warhol Fights for Life”. After recovering from the Solanas shooting Warhol spent more and more time in front of the lens as he ceased directing films to concentrate on promoting the Warhol brand. Besides stepping up the production of “business art”, this involved diversifying into magazine publishing (Andy Warhol’s Interview promoted the artist’s activities), rock music (Warhol produced the Velvet Underground) also film production and finally the production of his own television shows. Warhol also found time to accept commissions to design graphics for the Rolling Stones and to publish books (such as The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, 1975), even hiring two model agencies to market his “aura” to corporate America. As we see, Warhol deployed the photograph as a stage on which to parade these various public personas and a few that were less public. The cover of the catalogue is one of a symbolic series of Polaroids that document the artist’s transformation, by make-up and a wig, into drag.

Other documentary material puts us, the viewers, in the unnerving position of voyeurs. Between 1970 and 1982 Warhol and his assistants made a series of video diaries that demonstrate (yet again) Warhol’s uncanny ability to predict future trends. This unedited material records a variety of events (or non-events) that took place in Warhol’s studio. In the catalogue Greg Pierce offers a short summary of each of these. The subject matter encompasses the allusive (a series documenting Warhol’s mother asleep that is indebted to Warhol’s films of sleeping superstars such as John Giorno and Edie Sedgwick), the documentary (such as a 24-minute interview with Warhol’s friend Brigit Berlin/Polk and a 19-minute record of the artist painting) and the working reference (a sequence in which Bob Collacello poses in drag while Warhol directs and Warhol himself is shown undergoing drag make-up). Though shaky, these videos are powerfully evocative of a mythical time and place and (like the contact sheets already mentioned) give us a privileged view of Warhol making Warhol. Often he is only present as a voice or as a mute enigmatic presence. In one mesmerising excerpt he seems so absorbed by a tabloid that he has become invisible to those buzzing around him. While this representation looks like Warhol, it doesn’t seem to embody him. Or at least it embodies another unknown Warhol. Remarking on this Hal Foster refers to Warhol as a “blank Gesamkunstwerk-in-person, a figment of the Factory.”

A problem for the viewer is determining how much of this documentation Warhol actually intended for public consumption. Was there a more authentically private Warhol? (Despite his association with decadence, he was known to be a devout Roman Catholic who attended mass regularly.)

Warhol has been hailed as the first artist celebrity; there are plenty of representations here to affirm this (he was photographed with Mick Jagger, Calvin Klein, Princess Caroline of Monaco). But perhaps the TV appearances, the paparazzi pictures, the fashion shoots and such have taken attention from the fact that Warhol’s life and art were really intertwined in many complex and interesting ways. This new exhibition – the title refers to a novella by Truman Capote about a young man’s quest to find his identity – provides a composite portrait of Warhol as both a complex and contradictory artist and as a subject who was consistently in process.