Andy Warhol

Private Collection
Stellan Holm Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This work is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a black painted wood strip frame with small float.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

The Last Supper series by Andy Warhol, his last and largest series of paintings which he created in 1986-1987, is the grand finale on many levels to a career in which subversion and irony are the ultimate keynotes. For Warhol, the sublime is downgraded and the mundane is elevated, and in all cases, the sources are ultimately the images to be culled from our common cultural surroundings. Just as the portraits of Marilyn and Liz are based on publicity photo stills and not live sittings, Warhol's homage to Leonardo da Vinci's great masterpiece, The Last Supper, is sourced from reproductions of this ubiquitous and commonly known religious icon and not the masterpiece itself. How much more sublime than da Vinci's Last Supper can one get? And how much more mundane than a postcard reproduction? Warhol has once again succeeded in masterfully melding the "High" and the "Low" as stated by Carla Schulz-Hoffmann: "The series suggests both a wealth of meaning and endless boredom... The reduction to surface impact, a result both of the printing technique and radical isolation of the respective pictorial motif .... leads to that incomparable symbiosis between reverence and irony, melancholy and cynicism, which no one has been able to disentangle." (Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, " 'Are You Serious or Delirious' on the Last Supper and Other Things" in Exh. Cat., Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Andy Warhol: The Last Supper, Munich, 1998, p. 10).

On the occasion of Andy Warhol's memorial service in New York City on April 1^st, 1987, John Richardson referred to the artist's spiritual life as 'the key to his psyche'. For most of those in attendance that day (art world luminaries, film and rock stars and the international social set), this portrayal of Warhol was most likely a surprise given the very social and public façade promoted by Warhol himself. The artist was in fact the pious son of immigrants from Czechoslovakia, and the antithetical contrast between Warhol the artist – the ringmaster in the whirlwind that was the Factory - and Warhol the spiritual man is central to the production of the Last Supper series.

Warhol grew up in a fervently Catholic family and significantly, his first experiences with art were of a religious nature. Growing up in the Ruska Dolina neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Warhol inhabited a world of first-generation immigrants still expecting to replicate the traditions of the homeland for their children. Chief among these was the obligatory attendance of religious services. For the Warhola family, Sunday routines revolved around the liturgical ceremonies held at St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Church. The gilded Byzantine icons and crucifixes, compounded with other domestic religious imagery, namely the commercially available reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper (1495-1498), informed much of Warhol's fascination with the venerated image. This great narrative rendering of Christ's final moments with his disciples reverberates with the humanistic sincerity and eloquence of this sublime Renaissance master. By the time Warhol graduated from college and moved to New York City, these early visual cues had become internalized into a lifelong – and exceedingly private – commitment to spirituality.

The Last Supper series is also a magnificent summation of Warhol's core thematic concern. The celebrity portraits and the Death and Disaster series have their associations with Warhol's twin obsessions of mortality and fame, but The Last Supper as an aesthetic subject combines the immortality of religion with the immortality of art. Da Vinci's famous paintings – both the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper - appealed to Warhol as subjects since they fit perfectly into his aesthetic program of bringing everyday, universally recognizable imagery into the realm of Fine Art. The Last Supper is a monumental fresco so can only be experienced by a trip to Milan, while the Mona Lisa almost never travels, with her December 1962 tour to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art being one of the rare exceptions. Both works are known to millions primarily through commercial means such as posters, t-shirts, postcards and book illustrations. By borrowing these images from their reproductions, Warhol ironically returned them to the realm of painting in The Last Suppers of the 1980s. Their limited geographical access is trumped by the ubiquitous and far-reaching realm of the media and the world of art.

Yet, The Last Supper had far more personal connotations for Warhol. His brother John Warhola remembers that a picture of da Vinci's Last Supper hung in the family kitchen where they ate their meals. Andy's mother followed him to New York shortly after his move from Pittsburgh and lived in his home. He would pray with her each morning before leaving the house. Further "his mother kept crucifixes in the bedroom and kitchen ... In Julia's yellowed and frayed Old Slavonic prayer book there is a commemorative card with a cheap reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, which Andy must have often seen.'' (Jane Daggett Dillenberger, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol, New York, 1998, pp. 19-21).  When the dealer Alexander Iolas proposed in the mid-1980s that Warhol create a series of works based on this most famous of all murals, he relished in the project, ultimately creating works that varied from his most monumental paintings to a series of collages. Warhol used different sources to produce radically different variations on this theme: for works such as the present painting, Warhol created a screen from a black and white photograph of da Vinci's painting, while for the hand painted images that are based on linear outlines, he used an outline of the mural from an encyclopedia of paintings. In this chromatically lush version, The Last Supper is crisply screened against a softly radiant red. The hand-painted works would mostly focus on the rendering of one image, but the silkscreened paintings availed themselves of Warhol's signature aesthetic act – repetitive imagery.

The present rendition of the subject belongs to a group of works of this size which stack the repeated image one atop the other, but Warhol would also spool several images of this scene and of Christ's head across paintings as large as 35 feet. With the addition of the patterned camouflage design, in such works as the 25 foot wide Camouflage Last Supper, also from 1986, the image is transformed into an even more powerfully elegiac painting of the subject which may be the final puzzle in what was a gloriously puzzling life and body of work.  The visually dynamic composition borrowed from da Vinci – and its subject matter with its poignant meaning for Warhol – are both veiled in a pattern defined by its ability to conceal: Warhol's genius for irony is nowhere more dramatic than in the employment of disguise in the act of revelation. Linked conceptually with the Shadow and Rorschach paintings as abstractions, Warhol created canvases that were only camouflage patterns as well as using the device to mask self-portraits and other Warholian subjects such as the Last Supper paintings that had particular portent for him.