Andy Warhol

Estate of Alexander Iolas, Milan (acquired from the artist in 1986)
Sotheby's, New York, May 5, 1994, Lot 216
Acquired by the present owner from the above

London, Tate Gallery; Tübingen, Kunsthalle Tübingen; Stuttgart; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Württembergischer Kunstverein; Hamburg, Deichtorhallen; Vienna, Bank Austria Kunstforum, Sammlungsblöcke Stiftung Froehlich, May 1996 - August 1997, cat. no. 308, p. 215, illustrated in color
Walsall, The New Art Gallery, Blue: borrowed and new, February - May 2000, p. 29
Düsseldorf, Museum Kunst Palast; Vaduz, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein; Stockholm, Liljevalchs Konsthall; Lyon, Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, Andy Warhol - The Late Work, February 2004 - May 8, 2005 (Vaduz, Stockholm and Lyon only)

Heiner Bastian Fine Art, Andy Warhol - Anselm Kiefer - Cy Twombly, Berlin, 1996, no. 7, p. 15, illustrated

This work is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. This canvas is framed in a black painted wood strip frame.
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.
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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 public façade promoted by Warhol himself. The artist was in fact the pious son of immigrants from Czechoslovakia, and the antithesis of Warhol the artist and Warhol the spiritual man is central to the production of his last canvases: the Last Supper series.

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. By the time he graduated and moved to New York City, these early visual cues had become internalized into a lifelong – and most private – commitment to spirituality.

The Last Supper series, produced in 1986-87, is the grand finale to a career in which the sublime is demystified and the mundane is elevated, and nowhere in Warhol's oeuvre is the melding of `High' and 'Low' so explicit.  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.

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 radiant deep blue. 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. This 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.

Alexander Iolas had been the director of the Hugo Gallery in New York which held one of Warhol's first exhibitions when they displayed his drawings in 1952. By the 1960s, he presided over one of the liveliest galleries in Paris. He commissioned approximately 20 paintings from Warhol, including the present work which was sold from his estate in 1994, and arranged a grand and incomparable event for their unveiling. In January 1987, Andy flew to Milan for the opening and the show, which was to be a huge hit, was his last as a living artist. Iolas had arranged to show the works in the Palazzo delle Stelline across the street from Santa Maria delle Grazie, where Leonardo's original noble, yet faded masterpiece resides. Over thirty thousand visitors flocked to see the exhibition. In the seat of Renaissance Christian art, Andy Warhol had revitalized and re-commercialized one of the most famous religious paintings in the world. As Jane D. Dillenberger noted of da Vinci's original, "The image, of course, is part of popular culture, reproduced in every size and medium, including an imaginative variety of kitsch Last Suppers in exuberantly bad taste, some with changing colors and others painted in black velvet. Warhol, who was an avid and eclectic collector of ... kitsch... had bought a gaudy sculpture in the Times Square novelty shops.'' (ibid., pp. 79-80)  This sculpture sat poignantly in his studio in photographs taken shortly after his death in 1987, juxtaposed against a massive painting from the series tacked to the wall. This image is lasting testimony to the fact that Warhol did not engage with da Vinci's painting as an aesthetic practice but as one of his ultimate statements about the power of the image in our media saturated culture.