Andy Warhol’s Religious Journey

On April 2, 1980, Andy Warhol met Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square. John Paul was in the first bloom of his pontificate, and his image as a young, strong, independent-minded world citizen had been burnished by a visit to New York the previous fall. Warhol was hoping to cap a series of silk-screen celebrity portraits with the Polish pontiff. Warhol and his associate Fred Hughes arrived in Rome thinking they had a private audience, only to find that their tickets were for the weekly general audience. In his diary, Warhol recalled the event: “They finally took us in to our seats with the rest of the 5,000 people and a nun screamed out, ‘You’re Andy Warhol! Can I have your autograph?’ . . . Then I had to sign five more autographs for other nuns. And I just get so nervous at church.” He was in the front row, a V.I.P. after all. “And then the pope came out, he was on a gold car, he did the rounds, and then finally he got up and gave a speech against divorce in seven different languages. . . . That took three hours.”

When the service was finished, John Paul went down to the crowd assembled outside the basilica, trailed by photographers, and moved along the front row. At last, he reached Warhol. In the photographs, the two men are facing each other. John Paul is dressed all in white, tan and strong of jaw. Warhol has on a white dress shirt, a striped tie, and an olive down jacket, and he’s holding a camera. His skin has more color than usual; beneath his wig, there’s gray hair tufting out over the clear frames of his eyeglasses. He’s smiling. He looks like an ordinary person—just another pilgrim to Rome. Warhol extends his right hand and John Paul takes it in his left. “I didn’t kiss his hand. . . . The mobs behind us were jumping down from their seats, it was scary,” Warhol writes. He wasn’t ever able to make a silk-screen portrait of John Paul, but he did get a good photograph of the Pope that day. It is classically composed: vertical, black-and-white, with the sooty St. Peter’s colonnade as a background and the Pope jutting into the frame with his right arm and hand extended toward the viewer—a gesture akin to those of some of the saints atop the colonnades—so that John Paul’s eyes and the papal ring are the two focal points. It’s a photograph that could have appeared in Time or on a postcard.

That photograph is on view toward the end of “Andy Warhol: Revelation,” an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, and it invites the main question raised by Warhol’s work that uses religious imagery: What did Warhol make of all this stuff? It’s the question that people have asked about all his work since the beginning. One view is that he was detached and affectless, multiplying images mechanically until (contra Walter Benjamin’s prediction) their aura was enhanced rather than diminished. Another is that he was fundamentally irreverent, making movies called “Blow Job” and “Taylor Mead’s Ass” to flout conventional mores. A third view is that his work reflects an inside-out devotion: that he was a maker of icons, which together form a contemporary cosmology of people and objects divinized by fame.

The show—curated by José Carlos Diaz, of the Andy Warhol Museum, and organized for the Brooklyn Museum by Carmen Hermo, a curator there—offers ample evidence to support the latter view, placing its origins, as many critics have, in Warhol’s upbringing in the Byzantine Catholic tradition. Born in Pittsburgh, in 1928, and baptized Andrew Warhola, he grew up in a close-knit community of immigrants from Ruthenia, near Poland’s southern border. As a boy, he spent Sunday mornings gazing at Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints in the St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church, a congregation that followed the Byzantine rite—the priest hidden behind a wall of icons and incanting in Old Church Slavonic—and he gained a religious sense of the power of images. Religious imagery was prominent at home, too. His mother, Julia, made pen-and-ink drawings of angels; a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” hung in the hall. (“When you passed it,” he said, “you made a sign of the cross.”) A watercolor of the living room that he painted while he was a student at the Carnegie Institute of Technology shows a crucifix on the mantel—the crucifix that had been placed atop the casket of his father, Andrej.

As a young artist in New York City, Warhol maintained religious habits (noted in Blake Gopnik’s recent biography), whose full significance is hard to make out. He went to church intermittently, on his own or with his mother, who moved in with him in 1952. He drew Christmas cards for Tiffany’s. When Pope Paul VI visited New York and the United Nations in October, 1965, Warhol marvelled at how the motorcade (“I mean . . . the Pope!”) went right past Warhol’s Manhattan studio, the Factory, on East Forty-seventh Street. The account of Paul VI’s visit in Warhol’s book “Popism” presents the pontiff as an exemplar of Pop art’s bold style, from the distillation of Paul’s message at the United Nations (“essentially he said, ‘Peace, disarmament, and no birth control’ ”) to its summary of Paul’s press conference: “When the reporters asked him what he liked best about New York, [the Pope said] ‘Tutti buoni’ (‘Everything is good’) which was the Pop philosophy exactly.”

By decade’s end, Warhol would be dubbed the Pope of Pop, and among the images that gained him fame were those with religious associations. The “Mona Lisa” series was made in 1963 after the Metropolitan Museum of Art—with the First Lady Jackie Kennedy’s intercession—brought da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” from the Louvre to New York. Warhol’s “Jackie” series, from the next year, rendered Jackie Kennedy as a figure out of a pietà—like the one by Michelangelo on view at the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens—wearing the veil she wore to the funeral for her husband. And, in 1967, at the height of his fame, Warhol accepted a commission from the de Menil family, on behalf of the Catholic Church, and created a series of films titled “Sunrise/Sunset” for the Vatican pavilion at the World’s Fair in San Antonio. The pavilion was never built, but one work in the little-known series—a long-form video of a sunset over the Pacific—is on display in Brooklyn, with a voice-over by Nico, the chanteuse who played a role in the Velvet Underground. “Sunrise/Sunset” has been interpreted as a Pop counterpart to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, commissioned by the de Menils in the same period, as a “spiritual” gesture toward transcendence.

In June, 1968, Warhol was shot point-blank at the Factory (the front page of the next morning’s Daily News is in the exhibit), and he spent two months in the hospital recovering. The shooting was a turning point in his life, and his religious life. Having survived, he made a vow to go to church on Sundays, and in the years that followed he kept the vow, in his way—ducking into the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer, on Lexington Avenue, near his town house, “for five minutes,” before cabbing it to the Chelsea flea market. Having undergone surgery to remove the bullet, he carried the scars, which served as reminders that he was not an icon—he was a man with a body.

Two of the most powerful images in the Brooklyn show develop that point under the rubric “The Catholic Body.” One is a photograph of Warhol by Richard Avedon, taken in August, 1969. The black leather jacket that Warhol is wearing is pulled up to reveal a torso scarred by surgery. The image evokes the Crucifixion, in which Jesus’ torso is poked with a spear by a soldier as he hangs on the Cross in a test of whether he is alive. It also recalls images of St. Sebastian—a saint, typically shown pierced by arrows, who has drawn the devotion of gay men. And it anticipates the body-as-a-battleground controversies that would figure into the art of the nineteen-eighties.

Warhol, in the eighties, devoted himself to work that lay at the intersection of art and commerce: stylized self-portraits, Interview magazine, an MTV show called “Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes,” a screen print in the style of an Absolut vodka ad. At the same time, he made religious-themed art of all kinds. He made canvases of skulls and large semi-abstract crosses. He dressed dolls as priests and nuns, and photographed them. He engaged new mothers to sit for photographs while they nursed their babies, and from one set of photographs he produced drawings called the “Modern Madonna” series. The drawings evoke Christian imagery directly and without parody or irony.

In 1984, the art dealer Alexander Iolas offered Warhol a million dollars to make new work to be shown in Milan, in a grand building catercornered from the Santa Maria delle Grazie—where Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” was on view. Warhol took the commission, wowed by the fee. (“So I guess I’m a commercial artist.”) Over the next year and a half, he amassed reference images of the Last Supper, including tacky reproductions of Leonardo’s version, nineteenth-century art-encyclopedia entries, and a tableau with painted figurines of Christ and the apostles.

His “Last Supper” series, and the works constellated around it, would take myriad forms—more than a hundred works in all. There’s a set of ten punching bags, each emblazoned with the doleful face of Christ and overwritten with the word “JUDGE” in scabrous letters by Jean-Michel Basquiat. There’s a pair of white Converse high-tops featuring a silk-screened image from an ad offering a Jesus night-light, and canvases screened with come-to-Jesus flyers. And there are dozens of refractions of the image of Christ at table with the disciples: the face of Christ, the hand of Judas, and so on. Of these, one is especially striking. It’s tagged as “Be a Somebody with a Body” (1985-86), and, in it, several streams of imagery converge: the face of Christ at the Last Supper, an advertising tagline, and a stock image of a shirtless young man, beaming as he shows off the robust physique that an exercise regimen has gained him.

This work is at once religious and topical. At the time Warhol made it, he was a gay man at the center of a Manhattan art-and-fashion scene ravaged by AIDS. Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Wagstaff, Perry Ellis, Alexander Iolas—all had been struck by the disease. So had Jon Gould, a Paramount Pictures executive, with whom Warhol had carried on an intense love affair; so had Martin Burgoyne, a young artist (and onetime roommate of Madonna’s) whom Warhol had come to know. As the scholar and curator Jessica Beck has pointed out, Warhol executed the “Last Supper” series at a moment when AIDS was in the headlines, with Christian leaders—fundamentalist Protestant evangelists and Roman Catholic bishops in particular—denouncing gay life in harsh and cruel terms, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, for instance, declaring that AIDS was God’s way of punishing gay men for their sinful behavior.

“Be a Somebody with a Body” addressed the controversies surrounding AIDS obliquely. At the Last Supper, Christians believe, Christ instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist—making the bread and wine of the meal his body and blood, which he urged the disciples to eat and drink “in remembrance of me.” With this work, then, Warhol aligned the body of Christ and the male body, then under siege from the AIDS virus and from the Catholic hierarchy. And, with the larger “Last Supper” works, Warhol made the gathering of the disciples an analogue for the gatherings of gay men who came together in the knowledge that the friends they broke bread with might be present for the last time.

Two of those horizontal, nearly life-size “Last Suppers” are mounted opposite each other toward the end of the exhibition. One is pink; the other is yellow. Each is a double: two sets of the twelve apostles, in action, flanking Christ, whose eyes are downcast—the rare Warhol protagonist who doesn’t face the viewer. This Christ, seen so often in reproduction, is familiar rather than iconic, and, in its familiarity, it conveys the quality that Warhol cited early on as a key to his work: the “presence” he saw and felt in images, whether exalted or ordinary. These “Last Suppers” are not, in themselves, controversial; they are not, in themselves, religious. They are what I would call crypto-religious—work in which the question of whether and how they are religious is central to their effect.

It’s powerful to see these two works together near the end of the Brooklyn exhibition. For one thing, the “Last Supper” series turned out to be the last works that Warhol completed before dying unexpectedly after surgery for a burst gallbladder, in February, 1987, and the scale of the pair lends them an inadvertent finality. For another, they anticipate the crypto-religious art that would follow: Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” (a crucifix immersed in urine and photographed so that the body of Christ has a yellowish tint), and Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary,” featuring a Black Madonna encrusted with elephant dung, among other effects—which was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 and stirred controversy, with Cardinal John O’Connor and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani denouncing it and getting wide play in the tabloids.

These “Last Suppers” are, at once, matter-of-fact and grand—and, I dare to say, perennial. The most present-minded of artists, Warhol also kept his eyes on the prize of posterity, and he evidently grasped that the figure of Christ and the art of da Vinci had staying power, which would accrue to his treatment of the Gospel scene as the shock effect of his methods subsided. It worked: his Jackies and sunsets now seem to belong to another time, but his “Last Suppers” belong, cryptically, to ours.

An earlier version of this article misstated details about the World’s Fair in San Antonio and the papal audience. This article was also updated to include information about the Brooklyn Museum exhibit’s curation.