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Lot Essay
Andy Warhol’s The Last Supper is the artist’s ultimate statement, culminating as both the apogee of a lifetime of creativity and final series in the titan of twentieth-century art’s highly influential oeuvre. The painting sees Warhol revisiting and meditating on both his long and varied career as well as the broader history of art. His creative engagement and dialogue with Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic masterpiece asserts his prominence in the art historical canon and serves as a powerful reiteration of the principles and techniques which served Warhol’s entire artistic enterprise. The series was first exhibited to the public in Milan at Warhol-Il Cenacolo in 1987, where over thirty thousand people passed through the exhibition to catch a glimpse of the new masterpiece of twentieth-century art shown across the street from Santa Maria delle Grazie, the convent where Leonardo’s original fresco remains in situ. This would be the final lifetime exhibition for Warhol, who died just a month after the opening, and provides a fitting swansong to the artist’s storied life.
Leonardo’s early masterpiece became an obsession for Warhol, who produced an astounding quantity of preparatory material for the work, fabricating prints, engravings, drawings, screenprints, and even sculptural models in order to deconstruct and reimagine Leonardo’s tableau. The repetitious methods used in obsessively copying and altering the source material reenacts Leonardo’s own struggles with his fresco. The present work follows from Warhol’s previous silkscreen series of celebrities created two decades prior in the choice of an iconic, instantly recognizable subject, however the artist is here using the silkscreen technique not merely as a means of reproduction but as a tool for deconstruction, each replication serving to penetrate the innovative formal structure of the Old Master. Warhol presents the work as a double image, stacking two duplicated Last Suppers on a single canvas. This achieves a deliberate conceptual manipulation of perspective, reinterpreting Leonardo’s inventive use of one-point linear perspective into a multiplicity of perspectival effects. Leonardo’s careful construction, placing Jesus at the absolute center of the composition, is undermined and challenged by Warhol’s double image, which destabilizes and decenters these effects.
Leonardo’s Last Supper was Warhol’s ideal subject, as a decade after completion the fresco had already deteriorated due to an unsuitable experimental binding method, and so no longer reflected the glory of the original work. Centuries of restoration and conservation exist alongside thousands of copies of the fresco, creating a cacophonous array of related images all purporting to represent an idealized yet nonexistent referent. The masterpiece is thus studied and understood more from copies than from the faded original fresco, a fact emphasized through Warhol’s choice of source material for The Last Supper: an amateur photograph of a widely-circulated nineteenth-century engraving of the work placed upon a blue field. Warhol’s employment of blue pigment harmonizes the composition while fracturing the atmospheric effect Leonardo achieves in the original fresco, flattening the composition. The present work is thus a duplicated interpretation of a reproduction of a copy of the original, its very relation to the original a vivid assessment in the ways art becomes iconic through the dissemination of copies. Through these many intermediaries, Warhol is able to access and analyze Leonardo’s technique and structure in a way analogous to an art historian.
It is fitting that Warhol’s last silkscreen project would return to Leonardo da Vinci, as one of his first silkscreen works produced in the 1960s were of the Florentine master’s Mona Lisa. Beyond the symmetry of initiating and terminating his decades-long exploration of silkscreens with works after Leonardo, The Last Supper is also notable for its religious overtones, depicting Jesus’s last night before his crucifixion. Warhol himself was religious, attending mass weekly, and the theological component of Leonardo’s work must have moved the artist. Warhol’s interpretation of a sacred image reveals how a deeply spiritual work can be transmuted into an astute comment on popular culture through the endless effects of mechanical reproduction, recalling Walter Benjamin’s theory of how an artwork’s aura is devalued through reproduction. Warhol’s masterful reinterpretation of the theme reestablishes an auratic function to The Last Supper, powerfully infusing Leonardo’s inventions with Warhol’s insights to create a trans-historical dialogue reflective of temporalities and resolutions. This powerful artistic message is further amplified by its status as a work in Warhol’s final series, becoming the artist’s definitive statement.
Leonardo’s early masterpiece became an obsession for Warhol, who produced an astounding quantity of preparatory material for the work, fabricating prints, engravings, drawings, screenprints, and even sculptural models in order to deconstruct and reimagine Leonardo’s tableau. The repetitious methods used in obsessively copying and altering the source material reenacts Leonardo’s own struggles with his fresco. The present work follows from Warhol’s previous silkscreen series of celebrities created two decades prior in the choice of an iconic, instantly recognizable subject, however the artist is here using the silkscreen technique not merely as a means of reproduction but as a tool for deconstruction, each replication serving to penetrate the innovative formal structure of the Old Master. Warhol presents the work as a double image, stacking two duplicated Last Suppers on a single canvas. This achieves a deliberate conceptual manipulation of perspective, reinterpreting Leonardo’s inventive use of one-point linear perspective into a multiplicity of perspectival effects. Leonardo’s careful construction, placing Jesus at the absolute center of the composition, is undermined and challenged by Warhol’s double image, which destabilizes and decenters these effects.
Leonardo’s Last Supper was Warhol’s ideal subject, as a decade after completion the fresco had already deteriorated due to an unsuitable experimental binding method, and so no longer reflected the glory of the original work. Centuries of restoration and conservation exist alongside thousands of copies of the fresco, creating a cacophonous array of related images all purporting to represent an idealized yet nonexistent referent. The masterpiece is thus studied and understood more from copies than from the faded original fresco, a fact emphasized through Warhol’s choice of source material for The Last Supper: an amateur photograph of a widely-circulated nineteenth-century engraving of the work placed upon a blue field. Warhol’s employment of blue pigment harmonizes the composition while fracturing the atmospheric effect Leonardo achieves in the original fresco, flattening the composition. The present work is thus a duplicated interpretation of a reproduction of a copy of the original, its very relation to the original a vivid assessment in the ways art becomes iconic through the dissemination of copies. Through these many intermediaries, Warhol is able to access and analyze Leonardo’s technique and structure in a way analogous to an art historian.
It is fitting that Warhol’s last silkscreen project would return to Leonardo da Vinci, as one of his first silkscreen works produced in the 1960s were of the Florentine master’s Mona Lisa. Beyond the symmetry of initiating and terminating his decades-long exploration of silkscreens with works after Leonardo, The Last Supper is also notable for its religious overtones, depicting Jesus’s last night before his crucifixion. Warhol himself was religious, attending mass weekly, and the theological component of Leonardo’s work must have moved the artist. Warhol’s interpretation of a sacred image reveals how a deeply spiritual work can be transmuted into an astute comment on popular culture through the endless effects of mechanical reproduction, recalling Walter Benjamin’s theory of how an artwork’s aura is devalued through reproduction. Warhol’s masterful reinterpretation of the theme reestablishes an auratic function to The Last Supper, powerfully infusing Leonardo’s inventions with Warhol’s insights to create a trans-historical dialogue reflective of temporalities and resolutions. This powerful artistic message is further amplified by its status as a work in Warhol’s final series, becoming the artist’s definitive statement.