‘Nowhere’ was Warhol’s home
A Slovak cousin of Andy Warhol, the Pop Art icon, knew his American relative was a painter of some sort.
He gathered that much from the letters his aunt, Warhol’s mother, sent to Mikova, the hamlet in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains where both the artist’s parents lived before emigrating to the United States. “I thought he painted houses,” said Jan Zavacky, 73. Nobody in Mikova has made that mistake for a long time. Since Warhol’s death in 1987, the tiny village in Slovakia has — more or less — embraced its role as a place of pilgrimage for his fans. They come seeking to understand how Warhol’s family origins may have played in his rise into a global art star who grabbed so much more than just 15 minutes of fame.
The nearby town of Medzilaborce has turned a large Communist-era post office into the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art. The town’s main drag has been renamed Andy Warhol St. On it stands the Andy Hostel.
On the road to Mikova, a sign with Warhol in his trademark wig of wild hair proudly announces the village as his family home.
After waves of emigration, few villagers remain — a cow herder, a few dozen pensioners and a cluster of Roma families. But all know the story of how the U.S.-born son of Andrej Varchola and Julia ZavackyVarchola made it big in New York, after changing his surname to Warhol. Few of the 100 or so residents, though, think much of his art.
In America, “you don’t need to be very good at something,” observed Julia Varcholova, another cousin, who uses a different spelling of the family name. “You just need to be different. You don’t need to sing or paint well so long as you do it differently.” Warhol, she said, “was very good at being different.” For many years, Warhol’s perceived strangeness was a big handicap in how he was regarded in these tradition-bound lands.
Michal Bycko, an art expert who set up the Medzilaborce museum with help from Warhol’s family in the United States, said he visited Mikova in the 1970s and tried to spread the word that the son of Andrej and Julia had become world famous by painting pictures of Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyn Monroe.
“They laughed in my face,” Bycko recalled, and were “outraged” when he showed them a picture of Warhol in a wild-haired wig.
The Medzilaborce museum opened in 1991. It houses Europe’s largest collection of Warhol art and artifacts, including 10 Campbell’s Soup Can prints, various Marilyn Monroes, a snakeskin jacket worn by the artist and a pair of his glasses.
The museum founder, Bycko, said Warhol was in no way leery of his roots and referred to himself as coming from “nowhere” simply because the country his parents left no longer existed. “Andy never denied his origins,” he said. But his failure to visit rankles some of his relatives.