Andy Warhol

Estate of the artist
Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen/Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Andy Warhol. The Last Supper, May - September 1998, cat. no. 14, illustrated in color
New York, Guggenheim Museum SoHo, Andy Warhol: The Last Supper, June 1999 - July 2001

The Last Supper series, commissioned by the gallerist Alexandre Iolas and based on the famous fresco by Leonardo da Vinci, exceeded the demands of the commission, seeing Warhol produce nearly 100 variations on the theme. Working from photographs, outline drawings, and inexpensive plastic models, Warhol created works that appropriated both the whole and a number of its parts. By focusing on and isolating certain quotations from the painting, Warhol seemed to illuminate certain aspects of Leonardo’s composition and their concomitant meanings.

The extent of the series indicates an almost obsessive investment in the subject matter, and this takes on an added significance in the light of the Warhol’s own religious beliefs. The religious theme runs, indeed, through the last decade of Warhol’s life and is evident from the Crosses to the brightly colored Easter Eggs. It even underpins Warhol’s most abstract series – his Shadows.

Half of Warhol's Last Supper images were made with the artist's signature silkscreen technique, but in addition, he experimented by manipulating details of the figure of Christ or of groups of several apostles, treating them like elements in a collage, juxtaposing and repeating them on different scales, turning them, or filling them with flat primary hues. Here, Warhol focuses on, and repeats, the Christ figure, thrusting him to the front of the pictorial field, executed via a quick, busy line that expresses much of the artist’s own energy.

The Last Supper is indeed a work that sums up all of Warhol’s lifelong artistic achievements, both reflecting contemporary culture and telling us something about his obsessions. It allows the artist to take possession, at the end of his career and, indeed, life, of the work of one of the greatest artists of the past, veiling whatever private sentiment or investment he personally might have felt for such a theme, under the mantel of an artistic homage.