The religious art of Andy Warhol

by Jane Dillenberger

In the two years before he died, Andy Warhol made over one hundred paintings, drawings, and prints based on Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. The dramatic story of these works is told here for the first time. It reveals the part of Andy Warhol that he kept very secret: his lifelong church attendance and his personal piety. In The Religious Art of Andy Warhol, art historian and curator Jane Daggett Dillenberger explores the sources and manifestations of Warhol's spiritual side. The sources are to be found in Warhol's childhood in a Slovakian ghetto of Pittsburgh and in the rich rituals of its Byzantine Catholic Church, but particularly in his devotion to his mother, Julia, with whom he lived for almost 40 of his 58 years. And the manifestations are to be found mostly in the paintings of the last decade of Warhol's life: his Skull paintings, the prints based on Renaissance religious paintings, the Cross paintings, and the large series based on Leonardo's Last Supper.