Andy had, by nature, a philosophical mind. Many of his most important works are like answers to philosophical questions, or solutions to philosophical puzzles. Much of this is lost on many viewers of his work, since philosophy itself is not widely cultivated outside universities, but in truth most of the philosophical knowledge needed to appreciate Warhol’s stunning contributions did not exist until he made the art in question. Much of modern aesthetics is more or less a response to Warhol’s challenges, so in an important sense he really was doing philosophy by doing the art that made him famous. In other words, most of the philosophy written about art before Warhol was of scant value in dealing with his work: philosophical writings could not have been written with art like his in mind, as such work simply did not exist before he created it. Warhol demonstrated by means of his Brillo Box the possibility that two things may appear outwardly the same and yet be not only different but momentously different. Its significance for the philosophy of art was that we can be in the presence of art without realizing it, wrongly expecting that its being art must make some immense visual difference. How many visitors to his second show at the Stable Gallery wondered if they had not mistaken the address and walked into a supermarket stockroom? How many, walking into a theater in which the film Empire was being shown, thought that they were looking at a still image from a film that had yet to begin its showing?
Something similar can be true as well of certain religious objects, which we expect to look momentously different from ordinary things but which are disguised, one might say, by their ordinariness. Of the four vessels today claimed to be the Holy Grail, for example, the one that most persuades me that it might be genuine is an ordinary-looking vessel, drably colored, rather like an individual salad bowl, in a vitrine in the cathedral of Valencia in Spain. It really looks like something Jesus could have used at the table, given that he affected the life of the simple persons he lived among—carpenters and fishermen and the like. Of course, as befits so venerated an object, the Sacra Cáliz, as it is called, is supported by an ornate and gilded stand embellished with pearls and emeralds, but if one saw it by itself, it would be unprepossessingly plain, though it is carved out of a piece of stone. The Grail would not have been on so ornate and precious a stand at the Last Supper itself, where it was actually used for whatever was eaten on that tremendous occasion, touched with the lips or the fingers of who those present were certain was the Messiah. Jesus himself was like that bowl, if indeed, the claim is true that he was God in human form. Imagine that there was a man just his age in Jerusalem, who looked enough like Jesus that the two were often confused for one another, even by those who knew them well. The difference could not have been more momentous than that! Confusing a god with a mere human being is, toutes proportions gardées, like confusing a work of art with a mere real thing—a thing defined through its meaning with a thing defined through its use. Imagine a student who has followed a program of institutional critique whose thesis consists of substituting in a museum display an ordinary Brillo box for one of Andy’s—a work worth $2 million at Christie’s in exchange for a mere cardboard box of no greater value than that of the material of which it is made.
Relics are typically presented the way the Sacra Cáliz is in Valencia today—a fragment of bone is placed in a golden housing, set with priceless stones and perhaps images of the saint to whom the bone is believed to have belonged. One has to take it on faith that the bone is the bearer of special powers, but in the nature of the case it must look like a mere human remnant, and be able to pass all the obvious tests, like DNA assay. It is felt that the Grail must have extraordinary powers, given the belief that it was touched by God incarnate, but the history ascribed to the Grail, if it really still exists, has left no traces on its surfaces. That it was touched by Christ’s lips, that it held Christ’s blood, cannot be deduced from anything the eye now sees. Its plainness alone testifies to the possibility that it was present at the last meal Christ shared with his disciples, where it looked like an ordinary dish, maybe a little special given the special character of he who used it. But the test for whether Jesus was God embodied is not part of the forensic repertoire. The Transfiguration described in the Synoptic Gospels was intended to show selected disciples that Jesus transcended the merely human, for example, by his radiance. But the so-called Messianic Secret was meant to be kept quiet—Jesus preferred not to be trooped after by groupies thirsting for miracles. For anyone other than witnesses to the Transfiguration, Jesus was out and out human.
Andy’s last studio, just as he left it, 1987. Photograph by Evelyn Hofer, New York
I respond deeply to a description of Christ’s humanity by the great art critic Roger Fry in regards to a painting by Mantegna, now in Berlin: “The wizened face, the creased and crumpled flesh of a newborn babe . . . all the penalty, the humiliation, almost the squalor attendant upon being ‘made flesh’ are marked.” To paint God incarnate, the Christian artist need paint only a human being. Of course there were eternal indications, like halos, that represented the other aspect. But these would be mere symbols, the way gold frames symbolize that they protect works of art. Bleeding is evidence of being human, but there is no such simple evidence of divinity.
I have plunged into certain religious matters because of a thought of the philosopher Hegel, who said that philosophy, art, and religion are what he called the “moments” of Absolute Spirit. I offer this because it suggests that art, philosophy, and religion are forms through which human beings represent what it means to be human. One of the things that is distinctive of human beings is that the question of what it is to be human arises for us in a way that it doesn’t for other animals. There is, in that respect at least, an analogy between artworks and religious objects, and that may be a way to approach the question of whether and in what way Warhol’s art actually is religious. What is undeniable, of course, is that he was a Catholic, whose mother was quite pious, and that he and his mother prayed together, at home and in church. After her death he continued to attend Mass. In truth, most of those who frequented the Silver Factory were born and raised Catholics, including most of the Mole people. The critic Eleanor Heartney, herself Catholic, has written a very searching study, Postmodern Heretics, in which she describes “The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art,” to use her subtitle. A great deal of the content of contemporary art in America involves aspects of the human body that imply Catholic attitudes, but these aspects at the same time are offensive to a conservative Catholic morality. A good example is Andres Serrano’s incendiary Piss Christ, in which a plastic crucifix is displayed in a container of the artist’s urine. This caused an immense uproar when it was exhibited in the Richmond, Virginia, Museum of Art. Serrano is Catholic, and it is not difficult to see that he was vividly depicting the way in which Christ was “despised and rejected,” to quote Handel’s Messiah—jeered, spat upon, hit. Pissing on someone is conspicuously humiliating and degrading. Urine and spit are heavily laden with contempt, as feces or vomit would be, or menses. In my view, Serrano was seeking to restore the way Jesus was humiliated as he carried the cross to Golgotha. To be sure, it was a plastic effigy—but what difference does that make? Is the crucifix not an object of worship as much so as the person crucified? When Barnett Newman, a Jew, painted the Stations of the Cross, he did so in a very abstract and what one might call interior way. It is about unendurable pain, fainting, and giving up the ghost. But it offends no one, the way Serrano’s piece certainly does. Years ago, I quoted one of Yeats’s “Crazy Jane” poems to a member of the so-called Moral Majority when we were both on a panel charged to discuss the National Endowment for the Arts and the highly sexual work of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe: “Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.” He replied that it was hardly Yeats’s finest line, and I asked him to quote me a finer one. Crazy Jane was one of Yeats’s inspired inventions for addressing the sexed body and the physical basis of human love.
Warhol did not particularly like to be touched, especially by women, according to Viva, but he certainly had a kind of gleeful curiosity about sex and sexual parts, and made a point of showing it in his art, especially in his movies. Whether this can be explained by his Catholicism is hard to say. But nothing more sharply distinguishes the art of the 1950s from that of the 1960s in New York than the difference in how death and sex are represented in the two decades. Robert Motherwell—a Protestant—painted the great series of abstract canvases under the title Elegy for the Spanish Republic. Serrano showed cadavers in a morgue. De Kooning’s great paintings of women in 1952 were daringly misogynist, with their heavy breasts and bared teeth. Mapplethorpe photographed huge penises, or fists pushed into assholes. The fact that painting gave way to photography in the 1970s has to be crucial in how the same subject would be addressed. Andy tried to exhibit drawings of nude boys at the Tanager Gallery on Third Street, where they were rejected on principle, though Andy’s drawings were never as robust as his silk screens. Abstraction can, as easily as not, be understood as a form of repression, which can then make Pop seem itself a form of liberation. But the sexual revolution of the 1960s was bound to show up in art as well as life, without this necessarily meaning that the artists whose work took on sexual content were especially catholic. It was a change in the culture. Most of the facts affecting Andy’s religiousness belong to his biography. But none of this shows that Warhol was especially religious in his art.
Let us consider his last substantial body of paintings, based on Leonardo’s The Last Supper, which are thought by some to be evidence of Andy Warhol’s religiousness. As so often happened in Warhol’s work, the idea came from elsewhere, in this case from the dealer Alexandre Iolas, who had a gallery in Milan. Andy was one of five painters he selected to do paintings based on Leonardo’s The Last Supper. His idea was that a show of Last Suppers by contemporary artists would generate interest, since the gallery was across the piazza from where Leonardo’s masterpiece was undergoing its latest restorations, and there would have been an incentive for visitors to take in both it and versions of it by painters of our day. Warhol specialists have observed that he found the reproductions of The Last Supper in art books too dark, explaining why he used cheap copies of the old painting instead. But in my view, what is important about the fact that the original is Leonardo is that everyone knows Leonardo’s painting—it belongs to the common consciousness of the culture that Warhol shared with everyone who knew his work, and which he took as his artistic mission to raise to self-awareness—to show our inner life to ourselves. Leonardo’s The Last Supper is one of the few paintings that enjoys this status—Warhol’s can of Campbell’s tomato soup is another—though few of those who know The Last Supper ever actually saw it in Milan; it is better known through its many reproductions. To show The Last Supper as commonplace is to show it as it appears on a postcard, the way Duchamp showed the Mona Lisa, or in a calendar of masterpieces. Ask people to name ten paintings, they will inevitably name The Last Supper— not La Conversation of Matisse, let alone The Last Sacrament of Saint Jerome by Domenichino or one of the Mont Sainte-Victoire landscapes by Cézanne.
Andy treated the Last Supper as he treated many of his subjects. He did versions that showed series of Last Suppers, much like his serial paintings of soup cans or dollar bills. He doubled Jesus, the way he doubled Marilyn, or Elvis. Repetition was a sign of significance. He filled it with logos from contemporary products, like Dove soap, to represent the Holy Spirit, or the Wise owl from the familiar potato chip package, emblematizing wisdom. Or he used the General Electric logo to emblematize light. All these came from the commercial world in which he and the rest of us are at home, though it is fair to say that none of them held religious significance as such. Warhol’s great artistic project began with the images in the Bonwit Teller window and evolved on two levels—the level of fears and agonies, and the level of beauties. The level of plane crashes, suicides, accidents, executions; and the level of Marilyn, Liz, Jackie, Elvis, Jesus, radiant with glamour and celebrity. A dark world with radiant beings, whose presence among us is redemptive, and into whose company Warhol sought to insinuate his own ungainly presence, and to make stars of us all. His mission was to externalize the interiority of our shared world. The Last Supper has penetrated the common consciousness with the momentousness of its message. In making it his, he too has become part of what we are. And by making it his he shows us that it is ours, part of life, rather than something one has to travel to Italy to see—in this respect it is like the dish sometimes held to be the Grail, commonplace rather than rare, a dish like any other rather than something crusted with jewels and made of precious metals. Or, like his own early prints, something that one could buy for a few dollars at the receptionist’s counter at Castelli’s, where they were displayed in stacks. A genuine work of art for five bucks! No wonder he stenciled low price tags—like $6.99—on pictures of masterpieces.
The painting that most clearly alludes to the hiddenness of religious truth is perhaps Warhol’s Camouflage Last Supper, where the visual message of the painting is distorted by an overlay of visual noise. Warhol began to use camouflage in 1986, the same year in which he did his Last Suppers, and used it as well in connection with his own self-portrait, in which it carries something like the same meaning it does in Camouflage Last Supper: it reveals the hiddenness of his own truth, which is all on the surface. He famously said, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” He even did a series of works consisting of nothing but camouflage, which as a visible pattern had become as ordinary and as everyday as violence itself in the modern world, however unusual its appearance in art—as unusual as Brillo Boxes in art galleries would have been in 1964, for that matter. Critics saw the camouflage works as ready-made abstractions, but what they mean is that their subject is completely hidden. The camouflage swatch has in fact become the portrait of the political reality of our time, too horrifying to look upon directly. The inference, on seeing someone wearing camouflage, that it is a solder is based on a social truth that camouflages, is the visible mark of the military in our time.
My feeling is that the hiddenness implied by camouflage belongs with the idea that confidences were disclosed at the Last Supper. What meaning could be more secret than that the wine and bread are Christ’s flesh and blood, and that in partaking of these Jesus becomes part of the blood and flesh of the partakers? But I do not think Warhol became a religious artist in the last years of his life, with the Last Supper paintings.
I think the religious turn, if there was one, happened much earlier. I believe that at some moment between 1959 and 1961 Andy Warhol underwent an artistic change deep enough to bear comparison with a religious conversion—too deep, one might say, not to be a religious conversion. Before then, his work had a certain effete charm, consisting of plump cherubs, posies, pink and blue butterflies, pussycats in confectionary colors. He made a handsome living as a commercial artist, whose chief product consisted of playfully erotic advertisements for upscale ladies’ footwear. My feeling is that his religious identity was disclosed in April 1961, in his first exhibition—installed, symbolically, in a site displaying soft fluttery summery resort wear for the class of women for whom the luxurious shoes that had given him his first success were designed—the windows of Bonwit Teller, one of the great emporia for upscale women’s clothing on Fifth Avenue in New York. Warhol, as we saw, surrounded the mannequins with blowups of the coarse, grainy advertisements one sees in the back pages of cheap newsprint blue-collar publications. The images he appropriated after the conversion were vernacular, familiar, and anonymous. They typically advertise cures. A montage of black-and-white newspaper ads is for falling hair; for acquiring strong arms and broad shoulders; for nose reshaping; for prosthetic aids for rupture; for love elixir (“Make him want you”); and for Pepsi-Cola (“No Finer Drink”). It projects a vision of human beings as deficient and as needy. It was a message not unlike that of Josef Beuys, whose symbols were fat and felt, to minister to the hungry and the cold. All religion is based on suffering and its radical relief. It was as if the message of saviors had been translated into the universal language of cheap American advertisements. The Bonwit Teller show testifies to what remains perhaps the most mysterious transformation in the history of artistic creativity—Warhol’s “before and after.”
In a great photograph of Warhol’s studio taken by Evelyn Hofer just after his death, there is a large painting, on the far wall, of a double portrait of Jesus presiding at the Last Supper, his eyes cast down, while two disciples, Thomas and James, gesture with great animation to his left. In that studio photograph, many other paintings are shown, leaning against the side walls. The only other picture that faces us, however, is on the left of the painting I have been discussing. It shows a bowl of chicken noodle soup blazoned on the familiar red and white Campbell’s soup label, with the familiar logo, the neatly written Campbell’s. The image on the label is of a mass-produced china dish, whose utterly commonplace decorated rim rings the Queen of Soups like a halo. I find it affecting that the two images—Campbell’s Soup Can and Last Supper—mark the beginning and the end of Warhol’s career—at least, once he found his way. But I find it no less affecting that the plate on the label echoes the plate on the table, at which Jesus appears to be gazing with his downcast eyes, as if the plate embodies some profound meaning. I imagine Warhol, standing before the two paintings, at the final moment he was to spend in his studio, looking at both the dishes as if they were cognate Grails.
What his final thought as an artist was, of course, is impossible to say, but I like to think that it has to have been about two dishes, one empty, the other full of our daily soup, warm, hot, filling, tasty, like the answer to a prayer. The two paintings together reveal his calling as an artist. He is grateful for the daily bread asked for in the Lord’s Prayer. Meanwhile, he was in terrible pain from gallstones, for which he knew and feared that he would soon require an operation. The trip to Milan for the Last Supper show had been physically agonizing. The second and last death struck him on February 22, 1987, at New York Hospital. He died peacefully and to the surprise of everyone.