3. 86
hirty years ago, Andy Warholâs
Last Supper made its debut
in Milan. To mark the anniver-
sary of this project, Milanâs
Museo del Novecento is host-
ing a special presentation from
March 24 to May 18, 2017. Text by
Jessica Beck, curator at the Andy
Warhol Museum.
Iâve got these desperate feelings
that nothing means anything. And
then I decide that I should try to
fall in love, and thatâs what Iâm
doing now with Jon Gould, but
then itâs just too hard.
âAndy Warhol, diary entry, 1981
He became more and more like a medieval alchemist
searchingânot so much for the philosopherâs stone as
for the elixir of youth.
âJohn Richardson, âEulogy for Andy Warhol,â 1987
In the final decade of his life, Andy Warhol re-
turned with gusto to painting, working freehand
on a dramatic scale. Sealing his place within the
canon, he spent this period engaging contempo-
rary issues of technology and politics while also
making copies after the masters Botticelli, de Chir-
ico, and Raphael. But none of these subjects could
compare in number to the more than 100 paintings
in Warholâs Last Supper series, produced between
1984 and 1986. The dilemma with the current liter-
ature on these paintings is that it often makes lit-
tle reference, and in some cases no reference at all,
to the major crisis affecting Warholâs community
at the time of their completion: the aids epidemic.
The ambiguity in the literature on Warholâs subject
matter in the last decade of his career stems in part
from the conflict between his Catholic faith and his
homosexuality. This tension is often ignored in dis-
cussions of the work, with the result that the paint-
ings appear one-dimensional. Once these issues
are brought to the forefront, a broad discussion of
mortality and salvation can emerge as the crux of
the Last Supper paintings.
In 1984, the art dealer Alexander Iolas, an Egyp-
tian-born former ballet dancer and an eccentric col-
lector of Surrealist and other early modernist art,
commissioned Warhol to create a series of paint-
ings and prints based on Leonardo da Vinciâs icon-
ic Last Supper. Warholâs final exhibition during his
lifetime, WarholâIl Cenacolo, featured twenty-two
of these works and was staged in 1987 in the refec-
tory of Milanâs Palazzo delle Stelline, which then
housed the bank Credito Valtellinese. The venue
was selected for its proximity to Leonardoâs mas-
terwork, which was painted in 1495â98 just across
the street, in the refectory of the Dominican clois-
ter Santa Maria delle Grazie.1 While only two dozen
works were exhibited at the opening, Warhol had
spent two years, most of 1985 and 1986, producing
over 100 additional renditions of The Last Supper.
The commission, the last of the artistâs career, be-
came a near obsession for him. In prophetic fash-
ion, these images of the eve of Christâs crucifixion
marked the end of Warholâs own career and, in-
deed, his life. Just a month after returning to New
York from the opening in Milan, he was admitted
to the hospital for gallbladder surgery and died.
The materials Warhol produced in relation to
The Last Supper are remarkable for their quantity
and their diversity, including works on paper,
large-scale paintings, and even sculpture. Within
the series two distinct styles emerge, one that
stayed true to Leonardoâs original by screen-print-
ing the source image on canvas, the other departing
from it by combining hand-painted images of Christ
with commercial-brand-logos and text pulled
from newspaper headlines and advertisements.
Ultimately both versions present commentaries
on suffering, one through repetition, the other
through signs and symbols.
Few works of art are as celebrated and stud-
ied as The Last Supper, yet the original as Leonar-
do executed it on the refectory wall has not existed
for 500 years.2 Painted with an experimental tech-
nique on dry plaster, the image began to deterio-
Previous spread:
Andy Warhol, Sixty Last
Suppers, 1986, acrylic and
silkscreen ink on linen, 116 Ă
393 inches (294.6 Ă 998.2
cm). Photo by Rob McKeever
Collage of source material
for The Last Supper,
1986, advertisements and
headlines cut from New York
Post and collaged together
with tape. Photo by The Andy
Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh;
Contribution The Andy
Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts, Inc.
rate within a few years after its completion. Shifting
trends in conservation and decades of painstak-
ing repair have only succeeded in salvaging se-
lect details. Yet time has not muted the emotional
vibrancy of the disciples, or the complexity of the
perspectival lines and dueling gestures among the
figuresâ hands and feet, which symbolically point
within and beyond the pictorial field. No matter
how faded by age, these elements continue to per-
plex and inspire art enthusiasts and scholars world-
wide. Art historian Leo Steinberg contended that
the strength of Leonardoâs masterwork lies in its
inherent duplicity: since the nineteenth century,
writers have argued over which eventâthe reveal
of Christâs betrayer or the celebration of the Eucha-
ristâis more clearly indexed by the dramatic ges-
tures among the disciples.3 Adding to the sustained
interest in the work is the way itâs studied, often
from copiesâengravings and other reproductionsâ
that have varied over time as the original has dete-
riorated. Leonardoâs Last Supper is a kind of mean-
ing machine. Although Warholâs Sixty Last Suppers
(1986) was not exhibited at the Palazzo, it is one
of his strongest assessments of this multiplicity of
meanings at work in Leonardoâs original.
Sixty Last Suppers is a modern image that os-
cillates between flatness and illusionistic depth,
ideas that lie at the heart of Renaissance painting.
This monumental work is dramatically rendered in
stark black and white. Taking as his source the Cy-
clopedia of Painters and Paintings, first published
in 1885, Warhol screen-printed that bookâs facsim-
ile of an earlier engraving of The Last Supper in a
tightly structured grid sixty times across the can-
vas.⎠In the way he looked to the source, his process
here wouldnât have been dissimilar from that of the
scholars and enthusiasts before him: many cele-
brated writers of the Enlightenment, for example,
such as Goethe, based their study on an engraving
created in 1800 by Raphael Morghen, a copy that
left out the symbolic wine glass under Christâs right
hand.â” Warhol, who worked throughout his entire
career with reproductions as source material, un-
derstood the inevitable loss or change of meaning
87
Left:
Source Material for Andy
Warholâs Last Supper, 1980s,
printed ink on paper and
masking tape on cardboard,
11 Ÿ Ă 15 Âœ inches (29.8 Ă
39.4 cm). Photo by The Andy
Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh;
Contribution The Andy
Warahol Foundation for the
Visual Arts, Inc.
Below:
Andy Warhol in front of The
Last Supper (Yellow) (1986)
at the opening of Andy Warhol
â Il Cenacolo at Palazzo delle
Stelline, Milan, January 22,
1987. Photo by Mondadori
Portfolio/Archivio Giorgio
Lotti via Getty Images
4. 88
Andy Warhol, Last Supper,
1985, Polaroid Polacolor
ER. Photo by The Andy
Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh;
Contribution The Andy
Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts, Inc.
Opposite:
Andy Warholâs studio in New
York City with one of his
Last Supper paintings in the
background, 1987. Photo by
Evelyn Hofer/Getty Images
in the facsimile. He also understood how a repro-
duction can exist in suspended time. By the 1980s,
he had fully embraced contemporary mediaâtele-
vision, photography, and even the Amiga com-
puterâand had launched his own television show,
Warhol TV, which aired from 1980 to 1982. Cul-
ture as mediated experience is the appropriate lens
through which to view Sixty Last Suppers, with its
abutting black-and-white rectangles that look like
stacks of miniature television screens, the details
of Leonardoâs image faded by their shadows. These
were only the latest episodes in Warholâs sustained
engagement with modern media, which started in
the 1960s with his Death and Disaster series: be-
fore he was referencing television, he was creating
paintings that mirrored the 16mm film strip.
In late 1962 through â63, Warhol created some of
his most celebrated works, the Death and Disaster
paintings of suicides and car accidents copied from
periodicals such as Newsweek and Life. For a sui-
cide painting completed in 1962, 1947 White, War-
hol sourced a Life photo by Robert Wiles of a young
womanâEvelyn McHale, a twenty-three-year-old
modelâwho had leapt to her death from the eighty-
sixth floor of the Empire State Building.ⶠThe young
beauty landed on the roof of a limousine, where the
vehicleâs twisted metal perfectly cradled her, leav-
ing her body miraculously unmarked and her pos-
ture frozen like a sleeping beauty. Warhol printed
this image in an overlapping sequence that mirrors
the shape and structure of the film strip. The repeti-
tion and movement in works like this one heighten
and confuse the trauma of the original eventâthese
victims take on saintlike qualities as their suffering
becomes beautiful.
By contrast, in Sixty Last Suppers the image is
less distorted and the squares seem more aligned
with the cube of a television screen than with a strip
of 16mm film. In 1947 White, Warhol overlapped the
frames of the silkscreen and created movement by
printing the image from light to dark, a visual effect
that mirrored the flicker and motion of a film strip.
The grid in Sixty Last Suppers is clean, without blur
or overlap, and the dark shadows give the image a
soft glow echoing that of a television screen. The
repetition here is static, locking the image in time.
The moment, however, at which these images were
frozen was indeed one of public suffering for the
homosexual body. Branded in the media as the pri-
mary bearer of aids, the gay male became a sym-
bol of moral and physical decay. aids in these years
was presented both to show the authority of clinical
medicine, with its doctors working to find a cure,
and to warn of the perils of sexual deviance, the le-
sions of the sarcoma that often accompanied the
syndrome operating as visible stigmata of guilt.
The principal target of this sadistically punitive
gaze was the body of the homosexual.7
Jane Dillenberger is the author of the most thor-
ough writing on Warholâs religious works, her ex-
tensive research tracing a trajectory from his Byz-
antine Catholic upbringing in Pittsburgh to the
Last Supper commission. Dillenberger, a theologian
as well as an art historian, must have found aids
too taboo a topic, though, since she makes no ref-
erence to the epidemic in her book.8 Warholâs com-
mingling of commercial branding and images of
Christ in these works commented on the cultural
climate of the time in ways even the most thought-
ful commentators have overlooked.
By the early 1980s, the aids epidemic was begin-
ning to sweep through major cities in the United
States and abroad. The syndrome first came to wide
public notice with an article in the New York Times
in 1981 under the headline âRare Cancer Seen in 41
Homosexuals,â which shared reports from doctors
in New York and San Francisco who were diagnos-
ing homosexual men with a rapidly fatal form of
cancer.9 Out of the forty-one patients tested, eight
died less than twenty-four months after the diag-
nosis. Panic and anxiety spread quickly within the
homosexual community and the term âgay can-
cerâ was adopted to describe the disease. By May
1982 the Times had firmly connected the disease
with homosexual communities through the head-
line âNew Homosexual Disorder Worries Health
Officials.â10 Headlines from 1981 onward became
more alarming as public figures and celebrities,
most famously Rock Hudson, began to die of aids.
Warholâs first reference to âgay cancerâ in his
89
THELASTSUPPERPAINTINGSARE
ACONFESSIONFORWARHOLOFTHE
CONFLICTHEFELTBETWEENHIS
FAITHANDHISSEXUALITY.
diaries came on February 6, 1982, not even a year
after the New York Times article, in reference to Joe
MacDonald, a male model whom he had photo-
graphed in the 1970s and who would die of aids in
1983. Warhol recounts,
I went to Jan Cowlesâs place at 810 Fifth Ave-
nue where she was having a birthday party for
her son Charlie. . . . Joe MacDonald was there,
but I didnât want to be near him and talk to him
because he just had gay cancer. I talked to his
brotherâs wife.11
Just a few months later he referenced the New
York Times directly in an entry from Tuesday, May
11, 1982:
The New York Times had a big article about gay
cancer, and how they donât know what to do with
it. That itâs epidemic proportions and they say
that these kids who have sex all the time have
it in their semen and theyâve already had every
kind of disease there isâhepatitis one, two and
three, and mononucleosis, and Iâm worried that
I could get it by drinking out of the same glass
or just being around these kids who go to the
Baths.12
In each of the eight references to âgay cancerâ
in The Andy Warhol Diaries, Warhol expresses fear