The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Ma, Ma, let’s say our prayers…’
Andy Warhol became the world’s most famous artist, but he never forgot his family – or his faith, says Benjamin Secher
Andy Warhol’s life was a tale of two cities. Picture him now and the chances are you’ll place him in New
York, lurking among the speed freaks, wayward socialites, drag queens and dope fiends that flocked in the Sixties to his Silver Factory. That cavernous studio in a former Midtown fire station was where he shot his interminable films and massproduced the ground-breaking silk screens that would, in the view of Blake Gopnik’s new biography, make him “the most important and influential artist of the 20th century”. Or maybe you imagine him stalking, unsmiling, past the flashbulbs into the notorious Seventies nightclub Studio 54 with Bianca Jagger or Liza Minnelli on his arm and a flyaway wig on his head – one of countless defining shots reproduced in the glossy magazines of the era, which his two elder brothers would greet with bemusement and ask one another: how had their Little Andy gotten so big?
Four hundred miles from New York stands the house where Warhol grew up, a modest brick semi on Dawson Street, Pittsburgh. In 1948, at the age of 19, the young artist would immortalise this family home in Living Room, a juvenile watercolour showing a gathering of mismatched furniture, with a crucifix over the hearth; six years earlier it had adorned the coffin of Warhol’s father, a construction worker, following his death from tubercular peritonitis. The summer after that picture was painted, Warhol boarded a Greyhound bus and left the city, with scarcely a backward glance.
He certainly escaped much that was rotten. In the Forties, Pittsburgh’s air was some of the filthiest in America; pollution from its steelworks was said to be so extreme that if you put on a white shirt in the morning, it would be grey by lunchtime. The so-called Morals Squad, a corrupt, explicitly homophobic arm of the Pittsburgh police, had authority to punish any man found guilty of “sodomy” with 10 years’ hard labour. It was the worst of times. For decades afterwards, Warhol would tell anyone who cared to ask that he came from “nowhere” and dismiss Pittsburgh as “the worst place I have ever been in my life”.
Opening next week, a Warhol retrospective at Tate Modern featuring more than 100 works from across his career, asks you to look at the artist afresh, to consider his pictures through the lens not of who he became, or of how he wanted to be seen – as an unfeeling, million-dollar American art-machine – but of who he had been to begin with: Andrew Warhola, the gifted, queer, diligent, devout youngest son of a hard-bitten immigrant Byzantine Catholic family.
The show aims to restore to three dimensions a man commonly regarded as having no more depth than a soup spoon. Warhol himself liked it that way: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface,” he would insist, “there’s nothing behind it.” Gregor Muir, curator of the Tate exhibition, doesn’t buy that. “We wanted to tell the truth about Warhol, to demystify him,” he says. “He wasn’t just about whoopde-do pop; he had a mournful side to him that runs throughout the entire body of work and across the arc of his life.”
For Muir, the most interesting aspect of Warhol’s transition from Pittsburgh to New York is not what he left behind but what – and whom – he took with him: “his mother and her religion.”
Born in a mountainous Rusyn community in 1891, in what is now Slovakia, Julia Warhola arrived at Ellis Island in 1921, nine years after her husband. Within weeks of their reunion in Pittsburgh she was pregnant with the first of the couple’s three sons (years before, their only daughter had died in infancy). Every Sunday throughout their childhood, the Warhola boys – Paul, John and Andrew – would accompany their mother to St John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church, the focal point of an immigrant
‘Andy go to one o’clock mass… every Sunday,’ his mother said. ‘He good religious boy’
neighbourhood known as
Ruska Dolina (Rusyn Valley). Prayers were sung, incense burned and the liturgy, delivered in church Slavonic, would drone on for hours.
By 1952, the Warholas’ youngest son – now styling himself “Andy Warhol” – was making $70,000 (£55,000) a year as a commercial illustrator. Julia visited him in New York and ended up staying for the next two decades; in 1960, after buying a brownstone on Lexington Avenue, he installed his studio on the top floor and his mother in the basement, where she spent much of the rest of her life cooking soup with dumplings for her son and offering prayers to her god.
Was it his god, too? “Andy he go to one o’clock mass… every Sunday,” Julia told Esquire magazine in 1968. “He good religious boy.” The Tate show highlights where that spiritual side seeped into his work – a theme explored more fully in Revelation, a recent exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Exhibits range from a plaster Jesus, his bleeding heart painted with touching care by a schoolboy Warhol, to a 1980 sketch of the infant Messiah sucking at the breast of an uncommonly buxom Madonna. There is also a rare photograph of Warhol with a smile on his face, taken in 1980: he’s standing in St Peter’s Square, Rome, clasping the hand of Pope John Paul II. As Revelation’s curator, José Carlos Diaz says: “Warhol loved popes.”
While it’s not easy to see how the artist squared the teachings of his conservative branch of Catholicism with the more profane images that emerged from his studios – the bare chests and bulging crotches, the works painted in urine or semen, the kinky films – he remained a regular churchgoer throughout his decades in New York. At first, he’d take his mother to the Church of St Thomas More on East 89th Street, where they might spot Jackie Kennedy across the aisle; then, after Julia’s death in 1972 and his move to a townhouse off Park Avenue, he made daily visits to the local Roman Catholic church of St Vincent Ferrer, where he’d fill peanut butter jars with holy water from the tank in the vestibule to sprinkle about his house.
Shortly after Warhol’s death in 1987, at the age of 58 from complications caused by gallbladder surgery, Vanity Fair magazine published an article by the art critic John Richardson in which he recalled the sights that would greet those select few who were permitted past the door of the artist’s final home. “The bedroom could not have corresponded less to the popular perception of Warhol’s way of life,” he wrote. “There was… a large bedside crucifix and a devotional book… When I first saw the room, banked with pots and pots of Easter lilies, I could have imagined a Jane Austen-ish dowager ensconced there in a lace bed cap more easily than a maker of films like Blow Job.
How much this all indicates about the sincerity of Warhol’s faith remains a subject of debate. His biographer Gopnik casts doubt on whether the artist’s adult engagement with his mother’s religion amounted to more than superstition and aesthetic curiosity. When asked directly, in 1977, if he believed in God, Warhol’s reply was typically vague: “I guess I do.” In any event, Gopnik argues that he “certainly wasn’t ‘religious’ in the sense of knowing or caring about the details of his faith’s actual precepts and theology, which must be a requirement for counting as a good Catholic”.
The artist’s nephew, Paul Warhola, disagrees. “There’s a lot of misinformation, a lot of hearsay, a lot of garbage out there,” he tells me down the phone from Colorado. He still looks back fondly on the twice yearly childhood trips he and his siblings would make from Pittsburgh to stay with their Uncle Andy and their grandmother, arriving unannounced at the door on Lexington Avenue where they were welcomed into a freewheeling, art-filled realm that always felt to him “like our Disneyland”. Sixty years on, he says there is one custom of Warhol’s that “really stands out in my mind”. Before leaving for the Factory each day, “I can remember him coming down to the lower level saying, ‘Ma, Ma, I’m getting ready to go, let’s say our prayers.’ So she would come and he would have his little prayer book – and I was right there in the middle with them – and she would say the Hail Mary, the Our Father, the Glory Be. And he would recite it all with her. And then, hey, he was on his way. It took only a minute or two but he didn’t leave unless he’d had the prayer with her.”
While Warhola, who went on to train as a priest, has since come to recognise that the wilder parts of his uncle’s life in New York bore more than a passing resemblance to Sodom and Gomorrah, he still believes that, in what went on behind closed doors on Lexington Avenue, “you can see, right there, that he had deeply rooted religious sensitivities that the secular world did not drag away from him.”
On June 3 1968, Valerie Solanas, an unhinged figure on the fringes of Warhol’s circle, walked into the second Factory HQ on Union Square and shot him in the abdomen. Later that evening in hospital, he was declared dead before a nimble-fingered Italian surgeon got his heart restarted. “I spent most of the summer with him up in the hospital when he was convalescing after he was shot,” says his nephew. “About halfway through we were talking about the church and so forth and I said, ‘Gee, Uncle Andy would you like to go to confession?’ It took him about five seconds to reply, ‘Oh yeah, yeah Pauly I would like that.’ He didn’t hardly hesitate and I sensed that he really wanted it.
“So the priest came from the nearby Catholic Byzantine church, and I left the room but I could hear them talking: the priest gave the blessing, heard his confession and gave him communion. And I knew it was a special time for him. Even though he may not have agreed with the church on certain issues, he maintained that connection.” Does he think it possible that his uncle’s brush with death had put the fear of God back into him?
“To me there was no indication that he was scared of Hell,” he says. “I don’t think he had a burden. I didn’t detect that at all. I never sensed any kind of guilt or fear. That wasn’t the kind of person he was.”
On the day after the shooting, Edie Sedgwick, the Factory acolyte, sent Warhol a card of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice. “I am saying prayers for you,” Sedgwick wrote. “Don’t know how much good they do.”
The artist would go on to live for another 19 years. In a
12-month period shortly before his death, he produced more than 100 works inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s mural of The Last Supper – a print of which had been stuck to the kitchen wall on Dawson Street, Pittsburgh, all those years before. The Tate exhibition will culminate in the first UK showing of Sixty Last Suppers, a 33ft-wide canvas comprising 60 black and white reproductions of that picture,
‘I’m saying prayers for you,’ wrote Sedgwick. ‘Don’t know how much good they do’
completed the year before Warhol’s death. Almost uniquely among his appropriated images, the biblical figures in these Last Suppers are left in their original setting, the light pouring in through the windows behind them offering a glimpse of a world beyond.
After his death, Andy Warhol was returned to Pittsburgh. His sparsely attended funeral was held on February 26 1987 at the Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church, five miles up the Ohio River from the city centre. Another of the artist’s nephews, Donald Warhola, tells me that the family had wanted the service to take place at St John Chrysostom, back in Ruska Dolina, but the priest there had refused on the grounds that “the lifestyle” Little Andy had embraced since he last belonged to the congregation was anathema to his parishioners, and he was no longer welcome to
Andy Warhol is at Tate Modern, London SE1 (tate.org.uk) from Thurs. Andy Warhol: Revelation transfers to the Speed Museum, Kentucky USA from Apr 3
enter the church, even in a coffin.
“That still disturbs me,” says Warhola. “Whether or not my uncle’s life fitted into the nice, neat whole of Catholicism, whatever, he was a good person in his heart. He was very conflicted, he compartmentalised his life: he didn’t talk the talk but he walked the walk. I would love to take that priest to the Revelation show and say, ‘Well, look, you got that wrong!’”
Warhol is buried alongside his parents at the St John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery on a hillside overlooking suburban Pittsburgh. Webcam footage of the plot is live-streamed on the internet. On a recent evening, the ground appeared to be covered in snow and a deer could be seen snuffling between the headstones: GULUNEC. JACZESKO. RUSINCO, they read. Then, ZOLOCK, WARHOLA and, lastly – three Campbell’s Soup cans perched above the name of the deceased – ANDY WARHOL. New York feels a very long way away.
as that view is,” Aspel purrs, “please turn back.”
Moments later, Hosten (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is declared the winner – but as she smiles blinkingly into the spotlight, flour bombs launched by Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley) and a stage invasion led by her comrade Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley) steal her thunder. Watching from the wings, aghast, are the Miss World impresario Eric Morley (Rhys Ifans) and his wife and business partner Julia (Keely Hawes).
The film’s producer, Suzanne Mackie, first heard about the 1970 Miss World debacle on a 2010 episode of Radio 4 series The Reunion which brought together many of the original participants, including Hosten, Alexander, Robinson and even Aspel.
“My producer antennae went on and I stopped in my tracks,” recalls Mackie, whose company, Left Bank Pictures, also makes The Crown. She had felt the same when she first heard the “touching and poignant” story of the real-life Calendar Girls, whose story she helped turn into a smash-hit film back in 2003. She enlisted director Philippa Lowthorpe, who won a Bafta for her 2017 BBC documentary series Three Girls, about the Rochdale child grooming crimes. In Misbehaviour, though, the tone is very different.
“The last thing we wanted to do was make it a really serious, polemical film,” says Lowthorpe, “That would have killed the fun. I wanted to reach a huge audience of any age, from my daughter, who’s 22, up to my mum’s age. So it was really important that we captured the fun and energy of those young women.”
The “sparkly” tone of the script, written by Rebecca Frayn, appealed to Mbatha-Raw, the first actor to be cast. She (and her mother) travelled to Grenada to meet Hosten, who went on to have a remarkable career as a diplomat, far exceeding her modest ambition, stated to the Miss World cameras in 1970, of wanting to “work in broadcasting for the BBC”. “It’s a responsibility when you’re playing a real person,” Mbatha-Raw tells me. “I wanted to understand her perspective.” She also sought “the sense memory, the tastes, sights and smells of Grenada, so I could bring that to filming in December and January in foggy Wimbledon”
Knightley, too, spent a lot of time with her character, Sally
Alexander, who went on to become a professor of history. “What really struck me about the movement as a whole was they were women from all sorts of different backgrounds who, for one reason or another, were saying: ‘F------ hell, we need to change something,’ ” Knightley tells me over coffee. “Sally and Jo, for example, you’d never have imagined together, yet they came together for this extraordinary thing.”
As for Buckley’s character, Jo Robinson, she still “has dyed purple curly hair and biker boots”, Buckley tells me. “She’s just cool!”
In Buckley’s opinion, the craven objectification on display at the 1970 Miss World pageant was “insane. You look at all the footage from back then and all the cameras are down low, looking up the legs to the bums.”
Eric Morley – who launched the pageant at the 1951 Festival of Britain – comes across as the film’s pantomime villain. As he died in 2000, Ifans had to rely on YouTube footage to research his characterisation. I admit to him that, when I was on set, watching in the flesh the craven male-gaze categorising of the contestants – even in a make-believe environment – I felt ashamed.
“Yeah, me too,” Ifans replies. “I grew up in quite an agricultural community and it really did feel like they were being treated like livestock. It is really shocking that there was that level of blatant objectification in living memory; it was commonplace and applauded by millions.”
Hawes, who sees Morley’s wife Julia as a pioneering businesswoman in an era when women were rarely seen in the boardroom, thinks the truth about the impresario is more complex. “Misbehaviour is a film that navigates women in different relationships at that time,” she tells me. “Julia and Eric’s, more than anyone’s, was a marriage of equals. He respected her and listened to what she had to say.”
After the 1970 fiasco, Julia Morley rebranded the Miss World pageant as “Beauty With a Purpose”. It has gone on to raise $1 billion for charity. Now 80, Julia still travels the world as a philanthropic ambassador. The contest’s audience, meanwhile, almost seven decades after its inception, has risen to a staggering 900million viewers in 140 countries. But is the modern
‘All the cameras were low, looking up the legs to the bums’
Misbehaviour is in cinemas from Friday