‘Revelation’
Religion, spirituality and family run deep in new show of Andy Warhol’s art
The name Andy Warhol and the word religion rarely come up in the same conversation, but that’s about to change with the debut Sunday of the exhibition “Andy Warhol: Revelation” at the North Side museum that bears his name.
An extensive look at the personal side of the celebrated pop artist shows a man who remained under the influence of his CarpathoRusyn upbringing and Byzantine Catholic heritage throughout his life.
Andrew Warhola was born Aug. 6, 1928, in an apartment on Orr Street in Oakland to Andrej and Julia Warhola, immigrants from what is now eastern Slovakia. In 1934, the family moved to the home he grew up in at 3252 Dawson St. in South Oakland. They attended St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church in Greenfield.
As an adult, Warhol continued to regularly attend Mass, and for 20 years he provided a home for his mother, who moved into his New York residence in 1952.
Those aspects of his life come together in works like “Angel Holding Cross,” an ink drawing by Julia, who frequently participated in her son’s art making. The angel glides in a motion-filled flourish of lines reflective of Julia’s distinctive calligraphic penmanship.
Warhol is most widely known for his silkscreened celebrity portraits and the antics of the young artists who populated his midtown Manhattan studio. “Revelation” focuses on a deeper, more private Warhol whose personally constructed myth famously claimed that you could see all there was to know about his art on the surface.
The exhibition is essentially a retrospective of his spiritual expression, from a plaster statue of Jesus that he painted between ages 10 and 13 to work and source material from his extensive “The Last Supper” series completed in 1986, the year before his death in February 1987.
He was a man who could live with contradictions.
“He had the ability to compartmentalize his life,” said Jose Diaz, exhibition curator and chief curator of The Andy Warhol Museum.
“Warhol practiced religion on his own terms,” Mr. Diaz said. “He had been openly queer since the 1950s,” a departure from established New York artists who kept their sexual identities private at a time when homosexuality was criminalized in America.
The abstracted figures of Warhol’s “Two Heads and Clasped Hands,” circa 1955, are male. “They have Adam’s apples,” Mr. Diaz observed.
His social life in the 1950s, when he garnered recognition for his commercial art, was also “very queer,” Mr. Diaz said. His colleagues included fashion designers, department store window dressers and photographers, many of whom were gay. Warhol worked in the feminine space of fashion, costume and jewelry as an illustrator for clients like T. Miller Shoes and Tiffany & Co.
But “he didn’t abandon his faith,” Mr. Diaz said. “The Catholic imagery reappears.”
Early aesthetic influences entered Warhol’s imagination as a child attending Byzantine services. “They activate all the senses,” Mr. Diaz said. “The scent of incense, music that used the human voice as instrument, paintings, stained glass.”
The icons in the iconostasis, an elaborate screen fronting the altar, were devotional objects that guided parishioners in their communication with God. Those remained strong in Warhol’s art, as
did the influence of family.
They regularly visited him in New York. Although Warhol came from a bilingual household, “he anglicized his name because that was something people do,” Mr. Diaz said.
Warhol supported his nephew, Paul “Pauly” Warhola Jr., through seminary school. “By funding seminary studies, Warhol knew he was going to be a priest.”
Among the archival material exhibited is a 1986 menu for Easter dinner at the Church of Heavenly Rest in New York, where Warhol served meals to the homeless on holidays.
“He did this more than once with close friends and not an entourage,” Mr. Diaz said. “The menu ended up in a time capsule.”
Warhol’s time capsules comprise 569 boxes, 20 filing cabinets and a large steamer trunk filled with memorabilia he collected from the 1950s until his death. Other preserved objects include a ticket for an audience with Pope John Paul II at St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City, in 1980, and a button commemorating Pope Paul VI’s 1965 visit to New York.
Warhol’s 1963 silkscreen print “Crowd” is sourced from a 1955 United Press International photograph of people packed into St. Peter’s Square to receive the pope’s Easter blessing.
The influence of historic religious art is seen in Warhol’s depiction of women. He conflated iconic imagery of the Virgin Mary and female saints with contemporary women in portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Julia Warhola.
A graphite depiction of “Madonna and Child,” circa 1980, is startling because of the contemporaneous look of the bare-breasted mother and her suckling child. But it illustrates the timeless lineage of the humanity and religiosity of the body that Mr. Diaz feels is inherent to Catholicism.
“There is really something beautiful in the relationship of mother and son,” which, he noted, is important and universal.
It is unclear whether Julia knew her son was homosexual. She’d occasionally say to one of Warhol’s female friends, “You should marry my boy,” Mr. Diaz said. But she was accepting.
“She knew Andy was different. He was an artist who would become famous. He was no ordinary child and his mother knew that.”
One of the works having less obvious spiritual undertones is the film reel 77 of “**** (Four Stars)” (“Sunset”), which will screen continually in exhibition galleries.
The commission of the Warhol work for the Vatican-sponsored ecumenical pavilion at HemisFair ’68 in San Antonio, Texas, supports the assignment of religious symbology to it. The project was not finalized because, for unknown reasons, the pavilion was never built.
The 33-minute reel shown in “Revelation” was part of a one-time 25-hour film screening of “**** (Four Stars)” held in 1967 in New York. The cryptic title is used because Warhol did not officially name the reel segments as individual works.
He filmed sunsets across the U.S. for the project, and reel 77 features the summer sun off the California coast. In the first half, the sun disappears into dusk, changing from vibrant tangerine to deep purple. In the last half, darkness obscures the distant horizon. Throughout, Warhol Superstar Nico recites poetry in a “haunting voice,” Mr. Diaz writes in the exhibition catalog, “a narrative of life and death, light and darkness, and the presence of the divine.”
Considering the context, Mr. Diaz concludes Warhol intended the films to be spiritual.
“The ephemeral experience, a phenomenon of beauty, is metaphorically linked to creation and life, both in sacred and secular terms. Yet sunsets are also symbolically tied to the transience of life and the certainty of death . ... Here he crafted something meditative about the fragilities of life.”