"Andy Warhol: Revelation" Explores the Impact of Faith on His Art

Warhol (1928-1987) was born in Pittsburgh to a family of working-class immigrants from Slovakia. He grew up skinny and badly-complected, but more pertinently Catholic and gay (conditions noticeably conjoined in art history) at a time when being either wasn’t welcome in mainstream America. 

But, contrary to his image as an avatar of downtown cool, Warhol attended mass, underwrote his nephew’s priesthood studies, and served meals to the homeless. And, as his closest assistants could attest, he treated his studio, the Factory, as a kind of Vatican with himself as its passive-aggressive pope, presiding over a demimonde of dispossessed souls liable for excommunication if he tired of them.

Warhol was raised in the Byzantine Catholic Church, which, like the rest of Eastern Christianity, practiced the veneration of icons—a tradition that permeates Warhol’s appropriations of movie stars and soup cans. As a child, he was taken to church by his mother Julia. She remained a lodestar throughout his life, living with him in his Upper East Side manse for twenty years. One surprise of the show is that Julia made drawings of her own. These hang in a room devoted to her son’s earliest artistic efforts (including a plaster saint he colored in with paint when he was around twelve). 

Revelation goes on to recast Warhol’s themes in an ecclesiastical light, most especially his obsession with death—no small matter for someone whose sexuality was at odds with Church dogma and prospects for salvation. That fixation produced what are arguably his profoundest works: The Disasters series featuring images of race riots, car crashes, and electric chairs, an example of which, 1963’s Orange Disaster #5, is on view here.

Warhol himself endured a kind of crucifixion and resurrection in 1968 when he was nearly killed by a deranged Factory hanger-on and self-styled radical feminist named Valerie Solanas. She shot him three times and bullets tore through his lungs, spleen, stomach, liver, and esophagus. The resulting damages were documented in Richard Avedon’s photo of Warhol lifting his jacket to reveal a midriff striated with scars that could have been inflicted by a Roman flagrum. That image is installed within a section of the show featuring Warhol’s ruminations on the male body. These range from the erotic (a very early rendering of a beautiful young boy) to the abject (pieces made with urine and ejaculate). While these objects may have sprung from Warhol’s personal proclivities, and even his well-known insecurities about his looks, the exhibit goes further, connecting them to the centrality of Jesus’s figure to Catholicism in the form of the Eucharist. 

The latter takes center stage in several compositions drawn from the final cycle of Warhol’s career, his Last Supper series. Based on a nineteenth-century engraving of Leonardo’s masterpiece for the refectory of the Santa Maria delle Grazie convent in Milan, Warhol’s Last Supper was commissioned in 1986 by the dealer Alexander Iolas, whose Milan gallery stood across the street from the convent. Warhol attended Iolas’ exhibition opening on January 22, 1987, which would be his last before his death exactly one month later.

For years, it was considered gauche to tie Warhol’s religion to his art but, over time, its presence has become harder to ignore. Although the role of faith in Warhol’s oeuvre has been previously acknowledged, Revelation represents the first institutional stab at the subject. 

True to its title, this exhibition ultimately reveals that (contrary to Warhol’s assertion) there is a whole lot of something where “nothing” was supposed to be.