Image Details

Superstock/Artists Rights Society, N.Y.

The Pope of Pop. Warhol (1928–1987), shown in self-portrait , burst onto New York’s art scene in the early 1960s with his Campbell’s Soup cans (one appears in the photo of his studio). Over the years he produced seemingly endless series of images of himself (this self-portrait dates to 1978), Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and other luminaries of American popular culture. Shortly before his death, Warhol turned to Leonardo’s Last Supper and other Renaissance paintings of biblical figures for subject matter. His familiarity with religious art dates from his childhood in Pittsburgh, where he would have seen icons in the Byzantine-Ukrainian church he regularly attended with his family.