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Lot Essay
As Andy Warhol’s last work and ultimate artistic statement, The Last Supper is the culmination of the twentieth-century titan’s profoundly impactful oeuvre, recapitulating a lifetime of creativity and artistic invention into a singular series. Warhol places himself in contention with Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest artists in the artistic pantheon, appropriating and conversing with Leonardo’s iconic Last Supper mural to assert his place at the pinnacle of the art historical canon. As his final series, The Last Supper works powerfully to reiterate the principles which had defined Warhol’s entire artistic enterprise, meditating on fame, death, originality, and transformation. Warhol’s The Last Supper series was first exhibited at Warhol-Il Cenacolo in the refectory of Palazzo Stelline in Milan, directly across the street from Santa Maria delle Grazie, whose refectory is the site of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Warhol died in New York on February 22nd, exactly one month after he attended the opening of this Milan exhibition. “The exhibition was a farewell, a good-bye as shocking as it was wonderful, from which this Last Supper series subsequently derived a quality of mysterious enchantment” (C. Thierolf, “All the Catholic Things,” in Andy Warhol: The Last Supper, exh. cat., Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich, 1998, p. 23).
The dealer Alexander Iolas, who presented the artist’s first exhibition in 1952, also suggested the subject for what would be Warhol’s last show. Leonardo’s masterpiece became Warhol’s obsession, the Pop artist analyzing the famed composition from every angle and through a cacophony of reproductions. Warhol produced an exceptional quantity of preparatory material relating to the Last Supper, creating drawings, engravings, screenprints, and sculptural models of the scene in order to deconstruct and fully inhabit the composition. Warhol’s frenzied studies, stretching the course of almost two years, parallel the Old Master’s own struggles in achieving his mural, which demanded three.
Warhol explained to his assistant Benjamin Liu his goal of making Leonardo’s painting “exciting again,” stating: “it’s a good picture... It’s something you see all the time. You don’t think about it” (A. Warhol, quoted in B. Gopnik, Warhol, New York, 2020, p. 901). The source image seamlessly synchronizes with many of Warhol’s longstanding themes. Leonardo’s Last Supper had begun to deteriorate a decade after its completion due to an inherently unstable binding method and environmental effects, meaning that after many excruciating restoration campaigns, its present representation and its many reproductions no longer faithfully reflect how the painting originally appeared. The great historian of the Renaissance Jacob Burckhardt, reflecting on the mural’s deteriorated state, bemoaned how “all beauty on earth has to decay, in the world of art as in that of humans, and, by preference, death eagerly devours what is most splendid” (J. Burckhardt, Gesammelte Werke, H. Trogt, and E. Dürr, eds., vol. 1, Berlin, 1930, p. 14). This very aspect made the subject perfect for Warhol, whose entire career investigated the invention of celebrity and the inevitability of death and decay.
The artist aimed to achieve as close an imitation of the original mural as possible, searching widely for the perfect photographic model for his work. Warhol finally chose a cheap, nineteenth-century engraving found in a devotional souvenir shop across from The Factory as the model for his silkscreens. With this selection, The Last Supper becomes a meditation on originality, the instantly-recognizable subject seen in the present work arriving on the silkscreen from a cascading series of intermediaries—a duplicated photograph of a reproduction of a copy after the original painting—its immediate recognition with the original a vivid assessment in how works of art become iconic through the dissemination of its image in reproduction.
While remaining truthful to his source image, Warhol complicates the composition by doubling his source image onto dualling horizontal planes, arranged one above the other. Christ and his Apostles now appear not once but twice, profoundly capturing the many dualities of Leonardo’s original. This action of duplication reenacts the dual reality of Leonardo’s masterpiece. The art historian Leo Steinberg emphasizes the “incessant” nature of the Renaissance mural, writing, “the Lord’s supper holds more than one still image can show” (L. Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, New York, 2001, p. 111). The master infuses his scene with a mind-boggling multiple doubleness, capturing both Jesus’s announcement of his betrayal and the institution of the Eucharist in a single frozen image. In Leonardo’s painting, “duplicity... is the essence of the object itself,” a perfect visualization of coincindentia oppositorum—a unity of opposites, as postulated by Renaissance philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (J. L. Koerner, review of L. Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, The Art Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 4, 2004, p. 780).
There is an ironic symmetry in Warhol tackling Leonardo in his last series. One of the artist’s earliest silkscreen projects from the early 1960s was of the Florentine master’s Mona Lisa, the two Leonardo series serving as fitting bookends to a prolific period of discovery and artistic invention. With The Last Supper, Warhol was in fact returning to an important image which held deep sentimental value—his mother Julia kept a tattered reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper within the frayed yellowed pages of her Old Slavonic Prayer Book. Jane Daggett Dillenberger describes as well how, “significantly the decade before Warhol’s death began with the creation of his Skull paintings and ends with his 1986 series of the Last Supper. In this last decade he went from the theme of death and dissolution to the theme of redemption as imagined in the Last Supper” (J. D. Dillenberger, “Another Andy Warhol,” in Andy Warhol: The Last Supper, op. cit., p. 97).
Potently interweaving his own insights and principles into Leonardo’s iconic masterpiece, Andy Warhol established a compelling trans-historical dialogue with his predecessor. As his definitive, final statement, The Last Supper is inextricably linked with Warhol, forming a veritable self-portrait of the artist. The work visualizes Warhol’s ascent as one of the greatest and most influential figures of the twentieth century, surpassing even Leonardo in fame. The critic Arthur C. Danto enthuses how “when [Warhol’s] Last Supper was displayed in Milan, in a kind of citywide two-man show with Leonardo, 30,000 people flocked to see it, hardly any of whom went to see the ‘other’ Last Supper... When the final multivolume Popular History of Art is published, ours will be the Age of Warhol” (A. C. Danto, Andy Warhol, New Haven, 2009, p. 167).
The dealer Alexander Iolas, who presented the artist’s first exhibition in 1952, also suggested the subject for what would be Warhol’s last show. Leonardo’s masterpiece became Warhol’s obsession, the Pop artist analyzing the famed composition from every angle and through a cacophony of reproductions. Warhol produced an exceptional quantity of preparatory material relating to the Last Supper, creating drawings, engravings, screenprints, and sculptural models of the scene in order to deconstruct and fully inhabit the composition. Warhol’s frenzied studies, stretching the course of almost two years, parallel the Old Master’s own struggles in achieving his mural, which demanded three.
Warhol explained to his assistant Benjamin Liu his goal of making Leonardo’s painting “exciting again,” stating: “it’s a good picture... It’s something you see all the time. You don’t think about it” (A. Warhol, quoted in B. Gopnik, Warhol, New York, 2020, p. 901). The source image seamlessly synchronizes with many of Warhol’s longstanding themes. Leonardo’s Last Supper had begun to deteriorate a decade after its completion due to an inherently unstable binding method and environmental effects, meaning that after many excruciating restoration campaigns, its present representation and its many reproductions no longer faithfully reflect how the painting originally appeared. The great historian of the Renaissance Jacob Burckhardt, reflecting on the mural’s deteriorated state, bemoaned how “all beauty on earth has to decay, in the world of art as in that of humans, and, by preference, death eagerly devours what is most splendid” (J. Burckhardt, Gesammelte Werke, H. Trogt, and E. Dürr, eds., vol. 1, Berlin, 1930, p. 14). This very aspect made the subject perfect for Warhol, whose entire career investigated the invention of celebrity and the inevitability of death and decay.
The artist aimed to achieve as close an imitation of the original mural as possible, searching widely for the perfect photographic model for his work. Warhol finally chose a cheap, nineteenth-century engraving found in a devotional souvenir shop across from The Factory as the model for his silkscreens. With this selection, The Last Supper becomes a meditation on originality, the instantly-recognizable subject seen in the present work arriving on the silkscreen from a cascading series of intermediaries—a duplicated photograph of a reproduction of a copy after the original painting—its immediate recognition with the original a vivid assessment in how works of art become iconic through the dissemination of its image in reproduction.
While remaining truthful to his source image, Warhol complicates the composition by doubling his source image onto dualling horizontal planes, arranged one above the other. Christ and his Apostles now appear not once but twice, profoundly capturing the many dualities of Leonardo’s original. This action of duplication reenacts the dual reality of Leonardo’s masterpiece. The art historian Leo Steinberg emphasizes the “incessant” nature of the Renaissance mural, writing, “the Lord’s supper holds more than one still image can show” (L. Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, New York, 2001, p. 111). The master infuses his scene with a mind-boggling multiple doubleness, capturing both Jesus’s announcement of his betrayal and the institution of the Eucharist in a single frozen image. In Leonardo’s painting, “duplicity... is the essence of the object itself,” a perfect visualization of coincindentia oppositorum—a unity of opposites, as postulated by Renaissance philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (J. L. Koerner, review of L. Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, The Art Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 4, 2004, p. 780).
There is an ironic symmetry in Warhol tackling Leonardo in his last series. One of the artist’s earliest silkscreen projects from the early 1960s was of the Florentine master’s Mona Lisa, the two Leonardo series serving as fitting bookends to a prolific period of discovery and artistic invention. With The Last Supper, Warhol was in fact returning to an important image which held deep sentimental value—his mother Julia kept a tattered reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper within the frayed yellowed pages of her Old Slavonic Prayer Book. Jane Daggett Dillenberger describes as well how, “significantly the decade before Warhol’s death began with the creation of his Skull paintings and ends with his 1986 series of the Last Supper. In this last decade he went from the theme of death and dissolution to the theme of redemption as imagined in the Last Supper” (J. D. Dillenberger, “Another Andy Warhol,” in Andy Warhol: The Last Supper, op. cit., p. 97).
Potently interweaving his own insights and principles into Leonardo’s iconic masterpiece, Andy Warhol established a compelling trans-historical dialogue with his predecessor. As his definitive, final statement, The Last Supper is inextricably linked with Warhol, forming a veritable self-portrait of the artist. The work visualizes Warhol’s ascent as one of the greatest and most influential figures of the twentieth century, surpassing even Leonardo in fame. The critic Arthur C. Danto enthuses how “when [Warhol’s] Last Supper was displayed in Milan, in a kind of citywide two-man show with Leonardo, 30,000 people flocked to see it, hardly any of whom went to see the ‘other’ Last Supper... When the final multivolume Popular History of Art is published, ours will be the Age of Warhol” (A. C. Danto, Andy Warhol, New Haven, 2009, p. 167).