Jesus as Pop Icon

022023

On April 1, 1987, over 2,000 denizens of the art, rock and film worlds, the international jet set, and a throng of anonymous New Yorkers climbed the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to attend memorial services for Andy Warhol, the “Pope of Pop,” whose Campbell’s Soup cans became more real than those on our pantry shelves. Most learned for the first time that day of the painter’s lifelong church attendance and personal piety, which the flamboyant Warhol had kept largely to himself.

In the sixties, Warhol’s silver foil-covered “Factory”—his studio and the offices of Andy Warhol Enterprises in Manhattan—was a 024popular drop-in place for artists, film friends, art dealers, speed freaks, acid heads and transvestites. The Warhol of this period was a passive but ruling presence in black leather and dark glasses. Awed by the company of the rich and the famous, this Warhol had a prodigious appetite for experiencing life through observing rather than participating. In the seventies, the media knew a different Warhol—wearing black tie and grotesque wigs at dinner tables with movie stars, rock stars and international celebrities, and even with three successive American presidents at the White House.

To some people in the art world and the general public, Warhol appeared to be an immoral, avaricious and superficial entrepreneur. But the private Andy Warhol attended mass regularly, and several times a week, one priest recalls, sat or knelt alone in the shadows at the back of his local church. It was this Andy Warhol who, at the end of his life (he died at age 58), produced a series of profoundly beautiful religious paintings.

During the two years before his death on February 22, 1987, Warhol created more than a hundred prints and paintings on religious themes. These religious works were based on paintings by Renaissance masters: Raphael’s altarpiece the Sistine Madonna (now in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie) and, most notably, Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (painted on the wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan).

I curated two large exhibits on American religious art in 1972–1973 and 1977–1978 and continued to search for religious art by American artists, yet, for several years, I never came across any of Warhol’s religious works. I was astonished when I saw a photograph in a Vanity Fair article showing Warhol’s studio shortly after his death (see Andy Warhol’s Manhattan studio). The studio is a chaotic jumble. His last paintings cover the walls. At right is a pile of pictures Warhol bought at auctions and flea markets. In the foreground a bronze Hercules leans upon his club and frowns. Behind him is one of Warhol’s later Campbell’s Soup paintings. But dominating the room is a large canvas tacked to the back wall, with a painting of Jesus, St. Thomas and St. James, each represented twice, based on Leonardo’s Last Supper. Warhol, like Leonardo, shows Thomas with his finger pointing upward, an allusion to the “Doubting Thomas” who asked to see Jesus’ wounds (John 20:24–25). James the Younger, the traditional author of the Epistle of James, is represented with features like Jesus’ own. I knew Warhol must have done other paintings of the same subject.

I immediately began a search—in the end locating over a hundred paintings and studies based on Leonardo’s Last Supper, including at least 20 very large Last Supper canvases measuring from 21 to 37 feet wide.

Why did Warhol choose the Last Supper? Perhaps it was nostalgia. His numerous studies of Leonardo’s Jesus certainly recall his religious home life and the Byzantine Ukrainian church he attended in Pittsburgh. The church drew together the Carpatho-Rusyn miners and their families; the familiar liturgy 025and icons and their common language gave cohesion and comfort to these poor immigrants. From childhood Warhol would have seen copies of the Byzantine icons of Christ both in church—on the iconostasis screen before the altar—and in the homes of Byzantine Catholic families.

John Richardson, an eminent art historian and friend of Warhol, described the young Warhol as “withdrawn and reclusive, devout and celibate…Andy never lost the habit of going to Mass more often than is obligatory and of dropping in on his local church in New York, St Vincent Ferrer, several days a week until shortly before he died.”¹ The Warhol kitchen in Pittsburgh, where the family ate their meals, had a reproduction of the Last Supper on the wall. Andy’s pious mother, Julia Warhola, who lived with him for 20 years after he moved to New York City, had a small colored reproduction of the Last Supper in her yellowed Old Slavonic Bible.

In the degraded copy of Leonardo’s masterpiece on Julia Warhola’s prayer card, a huge hooplike halo hangs askew about the head of Jesus. Leonardo painted Jesus without a halo, expressing Jesus’ sanctity and authority by centering him not just at the table in the Upper Room in Jerusalem but also in the actual room in Milan where the mural is located on a wall above the refectory tables where monks once ate. However, for the religious supply-house purveyor of the image in Julia Warhola’s Bible, the halo, a more obvious sign of sanctity, was needed. Among other changes, the copyist transformed Leonardo’s bearded, long-haired Jude, the only apostle who looks directly at us (the second from the right), into a white-bearded, bald old man who now stands (the third from the right) hesitant, bibbed and helplessly looking at Jesus. In copies like Julia Warhola’s, Leonardo’s grand mural had become despoiled and trivialized.

The popularity and ubiquity of Leonardo’s Last Supper must have appealed to Warhol, who often chose familiar images for his paintings. But the profundity of Leonardo’s mural certainly moved Warhol. Historically the Last Supper has been represented in art with either the theme of the betrayal of Judas or the theme of the institution of the Eucharist. Leonardo combined these themes, picturing the moment before the identification of the traitor, when Jesus says, “Truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me” (Matthew 26:21), and all of the apostles react turbulently, each according to his own nature.

But at the center of their agitated gestures and movements, the still and inward Jesus sits, his head and body and outstretched hands forming a stable, equilateral triangle of quietude, a symbol of the Trinity. As Leo Steinberg observed, Leonardo contoured “Christ’s shape so as to allude to the Trinity.”² Jesus’ head is outlined against a light-filled distant landscape. His right hand with fingers spread reaches toward a wineglass while his left hand moves toward the bread. It is the moment of the institution of the sacrament as well as the prediction of betrayal.

Warhol’s many studies for his Last Supper paintings, complete works in themselves, testify to his absorption in the complexities of Leonardo’s 026painting. They also attest to his fascination with the small, inadequate reproductions of the Last Supper that have made Leonardo’s painting seem boring, even banal. The painting of Jesus, Thomas and James in Warhol’s studio is based not on Leonardo’s original painting but on an illustration referred to by Warhol’s assistant, Rupert Smith:

Andy’s last great work, the Leonardo Last Supper, was commissioned by Alexandre Iolas, the art dealer, early in 1986. He offered Andy the show in Milan right across the street from the real Supper. Andy worked on the project on and off for a year from photographs, but I could never get a really great photograph out of the 027real Last Supper books because the images were always so dark. In one, however, an updated Vasari-type book [an encloypedia of outlines of paintings arranged alphabetically by subject, first published in 1885], we found line drawings of every famous painting [by Leonardo], and used a kind of maquette [a model], a sculpture of the Last Supper we found on the New Jersey turnpike inone of those gas stations; it was white, made to look like marble, but it was really plastic.^a I think I paid $13 for it.

In the encyclopedia outline illustration, the nuances of Leonardo’s mural are reduced to traced, artless boundary lines. Warhol appropriated these simplified contours for his Last Supper paintings and studies. The double image of Jesus, Thomas and James, which covered the back wall of Warhol’s studio, follows the outline drawing and has flat, uninflected colors for the flesh, hair and garments of the two Jesus figures.

A comparison of the encyclopedia illustration with Warhol’s large painting, Last Supper (Dove), reveals how closely he followed the contours of the illustration (see Last Supper (Dove)). Not only are the facial features and gestures the same, but details such as the shadows on the floor are composed of similar parallel hatchings. A striking difference, however, is Warhol’s omission of the tapestried hangings on the wall; with barren walls, the room recedes from us sharply in the Last Supper (Dove), and the figures about the table thus appear monumental in size as they seem to press forward into our space. But in Warhol’s painting our attention is riveted by the obscuring and alien commercial logos: the corner of a price tag for 59 cents; the Dove soap logo in word and image, as we know it on Dove soap packages; and GE, the General Electric logo. The juxtaposition of sacred and secular engages and startles the viewer. What is Warhol up to here? We know he never chose an object, an image or a logo randomly.

Electricity and soap—power and cleanliness—remind us of the old adage that cleanliness is next to godliness. Significantly, the image of the dove levitates about the head of Jesus. Warhol was familiar with scripture from attending St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church in Pittsburgh while growing up and from his weekly churchgoing in New York. He would have known the account of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, when the witnesses saw “the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon Jesus like a dove” (Mark 1:10).

As for GE, “We bring good things to light” can be seen as a metaphor for the Creation, when God separates light and darkness and finds his creation to be “good”—God brings good things to light. GE as a symbol for the Creator, the dove as the Holy Spirit and Jesus as he is delineated at the Last Supper make up the Trinity. The Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is a theological concept that has a 054particularly strong emphasis in the Byzantine Catholic Church in which Warhol was nurtured.

The price tag? Everything can be purchased? Or perhaps the meaning is that not everything can be purchased. Or again, the 59 cents, which would not have bought much even when Warhol did this painting in 1986, may refer to a devalued currency and devalued religious images, which are here juxtaposed.

The interpretations offered here are speculations about Warhol’s intention and an invitation to the viewer to probe this arresting picture. It is too easy, and I believe entirely wrongheaded, to dismiss the painting as a witty pop confection.

The boldest of the paintings based on Leonardo’s Last Supper is the 30-foot-long canvas entitled Last Supper (The Big C), with images of Jesus, Thomas, James and Philip (one of the earliest disciples called by Jesus) painted in varying sizes and with the startling addition of three motorcycles, logos and a price tag (see Last Supper (The Big C)). The primary colors (red, yellow and blue) highlight the logos and the largest motorcycle, at left. The brilliant colors and disjunctive placement of the small, medium, large and extra-large images of Jesus in black outline give the painting a bruising, confrontational immediacy. Warhol’s juxtaposition of Leonardo’s Christ with the motorcycle, a symbol of untrammeled freedom, power and sexuality, reflects the tension between Warhol’s piety and his deep personal involvement in aspects of American culture inimical to that piety.

The largest image of Jesus in the Last Supper (The Big C), though like the three smaller heads in all other respects, has a stroke of paint across the eye, suggesting a large tear. Despite the commanding and contradictory presence of the motorcycles, Jesus Christ’s compassionate image dominates this painting.

Charles Stuckey, curator of 20th-century art at the Art Institute of Chicago, speaks of the mural scale of this painting, with its hybrids of sacred and profane metaphors, as akin to the juxtapositions of biking and religion in Kenneth Anger’s underground film Scorpio Rising, which moved from scenes from a Bible school movie to those of a motorcycle gang.³ Is it only a coincidence that the wheel of the motorcycle at the right presses upon the foot of Jesus, reminding us of Warhol’s frightening painting Foot and Tire (1963), in which we see a gigantic tire crushing a human foot?

Warhol was obsessed and preoccupied with the face of Leonardo’s Jesus. At least 70 Jesus images by Warhol are known at this time, and when the complete catalogue of Warhol’s works on canvas and paper is available, this number will certainly swell, as paintings sold abroad or given as gifts become known. Furthermore, the number of Jesus images increases by another 363 when we add the three huge silk-screen canvases entitled Christ 112 Times.

The large series of Last Supper Jesus images silk-screened over sheets of colored paper adhered to a heavy sheet of background paper are lyrical and reverential (see cover of this issue). Isolated from the actions of the apostles, and with the setting of the room minimized, the focus upon Jesus is intensified. We become aware of the inward and remote expression of his face. The Jesus image seems closer here to a famous drawing from Leonardo’s studio (see Last Supper, study) than to the damaged image in Leonardo’s mural as it appears today. The transparent geometric patches of color through which we look at Warhol’s Jesus image provide a 20th-century cubist device through which we see the 15th-century Jesus. The image that has been made banal by so many poor reproductions is seen afresh and anew. These frontal images of Jesus also bring us closer to the icons of Eastern Orthodoxy, which Warhol knew from a lifetime of religious practice.

Warhol’s Last Supper images form the largest series of religious paintings by any American artist, but very few of the paintings have been seen here.^b On January 22, 1987, an exhibition of twenty works by Warhol based on Leonardo’s Last Supper opened in Milan, in a gallery adjacent to Santa Maria delle Grazie and the Dominican refectory where Leonardo’s mural covers the back wall. More than 30,000 people attended the show before it closed one month later, when Warhol died in New York after surgery for a diseased gallbladder. The exhibition has never been repeated in this country.

This article is adapted from a forthcoming book by Jane Daggett Dillenberger, Heaven and Hell Are Just One Breath Away: The Religious Art of Andy Warhol. The research was undertaken with the help of a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.

On April 1, 1987, over 2,000 denizens of the art, rock and film worlds, the international jet set, and a throng of anonymous New Yorkers climbed the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to attend memorial services for Andy Warhol, the “Pope of Pop,” whose Campbell’s Soup cans became more real than those on our pantry shelves. Most learned for the first time that day of the painter’s lifelong church attendance and personal piety, which the flamboyant Warhol had kept largely to himself. In the sixties, Warhol’s silver foil-covered “Factory”—his studio and the offices of Andy Warhol Enterprises in Manhattan—was […]