Warhol’s Madonna

We present here an image of Our Lady by one of the most ingenious and impudent artists of the twentieth century, Andy Warhol. He never renounced his Catholic faith, and he could often be found feeding the homeless at the church of Heavenly Rest in New York

BY GIUSEPPE FRANGI

Who was this artist, the son of immigrants, who assiduously attended the Greek rite Catholic church in New York and often kept his date to feed the homeless at the church of Heavenly Rest, waiting on tables as a simple volunteer? It is difficult to match this description with Andy Warhol, the richest, most popular, ingenious, and impudent artist of the second half of the twentieth century. And yet all these things are true. They are part of a secret biography that Warhol himself, with meaningful modesty, kept in the shadows, far away from the spotlights that were always on, trying to spy out every secret corner of his life.

This scandalous Andy’s real name was Andrew Warhola. He was the youngest of three children of a Slovakian couple who had come to America to escape the poverty of their homeland, Mikova, in the Carpathian Mountains, almost on the Polish border. His father Andrej was a stonemason, and joined a group of his fellow countrymen in Pittsburgh who had opened the way for emigration. They lived in a ghetto, Ruska Dolina, built around the Byzantine Catholic church of St John Chrystostom. Here, Andrew was baptized. And here, from a very young age, he registered in his memory, during the long ceremonies, the many colors of the frescoes painted on the iconostasis, the rood screen used in the Eastern tradition to divide the chancel from the area where the faithful were congregated.

Instinctive obedience
Arriving in New York in 1949, Warhol did not forget his roots. He made his living as a commercial artist doing advertising, in particular for Tiffany’s, often using gold paper, cut-out or as a background. Whenever he was asked for Christmas images, the themes of the Nativity and the crèche were his favorites. He made one in 1957 that pays explicit homage to his family: a little stable with Mary and the Baby, like those of the tradition of their home country, carried on the palm of one hand. But Warhol’s eye was already the eye of a cultivated artist; in fact, the holy figures are inspired by a panel painting by Giovanni di Paolo in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. For another Madonna made in 1955, reproduced here, he used an opposite procedure. The gold paper forms the background, as though evoking the great artists of the thirteenth century. Against this gold, the intense blue of Our Lady’s cloak, painted in watercolor, stands out. Ever since the twelfth century, blue has been an obligatory iconographical attribute of Mary. Warhol’s instinctive obedience to a traditional given is moving. Precisely he, the leveler of every cultural presupposition of painting, he who put the most ordinary commercial product and the great masterpieces on the same level of dignity, adhered without batting an eyelid to the idea that the Virgin has to be painted wearing blue.

Without anxiety or pretense
This is a small detail, but a revealing one. Warhol always lived his relationship with Catholicism without any anxiety or pretense. He was almost unwilling to talk about it, but certainly not because he was afraid the fact could arouse disconcertment in the world around him. He kept it to himself, just as he kept to himself his relationship with his mother, whom he went to see every evening in a house that no one else could visit. Accustomed to being a completely public figure, to revealing everything in front of the spotlights of the great media circus that he had attracted around him, he preserved nonetheless this little area of shadow, which swallowed him up every so often without anyone understanding why and without his ever feeling bound to provide an explanation. When his mother died in 1972, he kept up the habit of going three times a week to the same church that she had attended daily. Fr Sonny Matarazzo, the Dominican father who was parish priest at St Vincent Ferrer on Lexington Avenue, confirms that Warhol assiduously attended every Sunday, even if he never received the Sacraments. Andy rarely spoke of his devotion. In his Diaries, once, on April 2, 1984, he justified this reservation of his with a curious excuse: “I go to church alone because I don’t want anybody to see me making the sign of the Cross backwards like the Orthodox” [ie, touching first the right shoulder and then the left].

Ugly teeth and perfect teeth
Thus, even as a rich and famous man, whenever he could, he would go to help feed the homeless at the church of Heavenly Rest on 90th Street. “Andy would fix the coffee, serve the food, and help clean up. He was truly a friend of these friendless people. He loved these forgotten people of New York and they loved him back,” one witness recounts. Warhol did not keep these gestures of his secret. On the contrary, every so often he would try to drag one of his reluctant friends to this kitchen for the poor. And once they were inside, he did not allow any protesting, commenting, “If we are here, it is because we wanted to be here.” Later, in his diary, he left a trace of this experience: “It is a different world. You see people with ugly teeth. And we are used to all these people with perfect teeth.”

When he died on February 22, 1987, on his bedside table they found a crucifix, a prayer book for Greek Catholics, and on the wall next to the bed a reproduction of the Sistine Madonna by Raphael. And this Madonna, too, has a Raphaelesque air, as she holds the Baby reaching out toward the world.