More on Warhol
Yesterday, I posted a piece titled Andy Warhol's toys about my recent visit to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh where, in addition to his art, I hoped to learn more about his Byzantine Catholic faith. In this regard the biography at the museum provided little of substance:
“Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh on August 6, 1928. He was the youngest of three sons born to Carpatho-Rusyn parents, Andrej and Julia Warhol. As devout Byzantine Catholics, the family attended church regularly and observed many customs of their heritage.”
That didn’t quite meet my expectations, but last night I read an article by Mike Aquilina written in 2018 for Angelus News titled “Pop heart: Andy Warhol’s complicated Catholicism.” In it I found the tangibles lacking in the museum bio. A few salient points:
About Warhol’s childhood Aquilina writes: “It was the children’s custom to drop to their knees and pray with their mother before they left the house each day. Every Sunday the family walked more than a mile to the divine liturgy at St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church.”
I learned that Warhol’s mother decorated their home with icons and holy cards. That seems important: the work of icons and especially the artistic attention paid to holy cards in those years—the use of color, texture, and fabrics as in the samples from 1930s below—would surely impress a youngster with imaginative and creative inclinations. It’s easy to picture a young Andy Warhol holding and studying these small works of art.
I knew from a museum exhibit that Warhol had graduated from college in 1949 and moved to Manhattan, but I learned from Aquilina’s report that he sent for his widowed mother, Julia, to join him in NYC in 1951. She lived with him until 1971 and during those twenty years “mother and son continued the practice of praying together. Julia went to daily Mass, and he often joined her.”
The museum noted the bizarre 1968 attempt to murder Warhol in his studio, but I read in Aquilina’s piece that as Andy “lay bleeding in the hospital, he promised God to be regular about churchgoing if he survived. He kept his promise. Probably the phrase that appears most often in his diary is ‘Went to Church’ (or its near equivalents, such as ‘Went to Mass’).”
And finally, the writer made this great point: “What’s certain is that Warhol was as serious about his faith as he was about anything. What’s debatable is how serious he was about anything.”
There’s much more, great detail, and photos, so I recommend reading Aquilina’s entire article. You can find it here. Warhol is less of an enigma to me now, and my only regret is that I didn’t read the piece before going to the museum.