Pittsburgh has a prominent role in "Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film," the PBS "American Masters" program that airs Wednesday and Thursday nights on WQED and will receive a special screening tomorrow night at The Andy Warhol Museum.

	"Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film" Preview screening: 7 p.m. tomorrow at The Andy Warhol Museum, North Side. TV premiere: 9 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday on WQED.   The Warhol screening will be held from 7 to 11 p.m. tomorrow, preceded at 6 p.m. by a beer and pretzel reception. The $20 admission will benefit the museum's exhibition and performance programs. Seating is limited. For information or tickets, call 412-237-8300.

A large percentage of the city's population probably knows that the internationally famous artist was born here, and also is to different degrees acquainted with his rags-to-riches story.

But this enlightening and thorough presentation will fill in the gaps about the sickly child of poor immigrant parents who not only found but also defined fame in New York City after earning a degree in commercial art from Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University).

It should also clear the record of discrepancies regarding such things as his place and date of birth -- some of which were mischievously planted by Warhol himself.

The opening sequence alone is worth tuning in for: The short clip from one of Warhol's deadpan interviews was part of his carefully constructed public persona.

Director Ric Burns' accomplishment is to weave that persona and the more sensational and generally reported aspects of Warhol's biography -- the 1960s sex and drug scene at his Factory studio, his commercialism and his homosexuality -- into a larger and more complex picture of the man himself.

The tone is set during the introduction with a quote by art critic Dave Hickey, who describes Warhol as a "hard-working Democrat, church-goer and businessman, social climber, empire builder and inveterate consumer."

Further, he was one of us, "the most American of artists and the most artistic of Americans." His genius was to thoroughly observe and absorb the culture of his time and to reflect it back through his art.

Also threaded into this chronological frame are examples of and commentary about Warhol's vast body of artwork that illustrate its progression and explain why it was innovative and remains significant, both within the art world and the market.

The documentary is bookended with scenes of Pittsburgh, where he was born in 1928 and was laid to rest in 1987. A plain house that the family rented rooms in when he was young and childhood photographs reflect his working-class origin.

St. John Chrysostom, the Byzantine Catholic church that he and his mother attended eight hours each week, is also featured. Some argue that its iconostasis covered with gold-haloed images of the saints influenced Warhol's stylistic approach to his celebrity silkscreens.

Near the program's conclusion, a snowy visit is made to the humble outlying graveyard where he's buried, beneath a modest stone.

But the portion of his life that garnered Warhol a fortune and a place in the art history canon was spent in New York City, as is the largest part of the film.

In 1949, he arrived in New York with $200 and a portfolio of drawings, and by 1959 he was the best-known, most highly paid commercial artist in the city.

It took longer to become recognized by the fine art world, since the distinctions between High and Low Art -- which Warhol helped to loosen up -- were still haughtily observed. But when he was finally given his first one-man show in New York, in late 1962, it was a huge success.

When Warhol moved his studio to the space that in 1964 became the Factory, his social environment changed markedly. Surrounded by talented but outsider individuals who brought excitement but also a dark tension to the large work space, Warhol turned to making films and in 1965 formally declared that he was abandoning painting.

Burns doesn't whitewash the fact that Warhol had detractors, and explores the love-hate relationship some of his Factory followers felt. Drella, a nickname assigned Warhol that's a blend of Dracula and Cinderella, referred to the lack of responsibility he demonstrated for the self-destructive groupies who periodically burned out, and worse.

It's within this context that his attempted murder by the disaffected Valerie Solanas, who shot him in 1968, is discussed.

Having survived that, Warhol once again changed his aesthetic emphasis, returning to paint in 1987 with an image of Mao Zedong, appropriating the Chinese Communist leader to launch his most capitalist of ventures.

Perhaps prophetically he made a series of paintings based on a scene of The Last Supper not long before he entered the hospital for a routine gall bladder operation, something he was wary of doing because of a distrust of hospitals fostered during the shooting incident.

He died in the hospital, allegedly a victim of staff negligence.

This is a serious treatment of Warhol and insight given to such things as the murder attempt or how he came to paint soup cans adds dimension to his life. It will take a sequel to flesh out the Factory years, his filmmaking and such projects as the Time Capsules that didn't make it into this cut.