The Last Supper... Andy Warhol's...Χρόνια Πολλά...

Guggenheim Museum SoHo June 1999-Summer 2001 More than 60 silkscreens, paintings, and works on paper from the collections of Peter Brant and Heiner Friedrich are on view in the first extensive U.S. presentation of Andy Warhol's monumental final cycle The Last Supper (1986). In 1984, gallerist Alexandre Iolas commissioned Warhol to create a group of works based on Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper (1495-97) for an exhibition space in the Palazzo Stelline in Milan, located across the street from Santa Maria delle Grazie, home of Leonardo's masterpiece. Warhol exceeded the demands of the commission and produced nearly 100 variations on the theme. Indeed, the extent of the series indicates an almost obsessive investment in the subject matter, which takes on an added significance in light of the revelation of the secret religious life revealed after Warhol's death, which occurred only a month after the opening of the Milan exhibition in January 1987. The cycle also refers to the artist's use of Leonardo's Mona Lisa 20 years earlier, and to his series begun during the mid-1980s based on Renaissance and Modernist masterworks. As he did with most subjects, Warhol approached The Last Supper through mediations of the original, working from a cheap black and white photograph of a widely circulated 19th-century engraving and a schematic outline drawing found in a 1913 Cyclopedia of Painters and Painting. The former served as model for the silkscreens, the latter for the so-called handdrawn paintings, which were made by tracing the simplified contours of the encyclopedia illustration as they were projected onto the canvas. While Warhol had practiced silkscreening since the early 1960s and throughout the '70s, he took up tracing only in 1983 during his collaborations with artists Francesco Clemente and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Some compositions appropriate Leonardo's entire pictorial design, while others explore details of individual figures and groups, singularly or in repetition, differing in orientation, scale, and color. This varied handling denies the visual unity of Leonardo's exemplary demonstration of one-point perspective as well as the painting's spiritual content by favoring a visual multiplicity and by including references to popular culture. Advertising logos for Wise Potato Chips, Dove Soap, and General Electric (a feature of Warhol's pictures that can be traced back to his Campbell's soup cans of the early 1960s) are superimposed on the figures of Christ and the Apostles, creating a hybrid of the sacred and profane, high art and commercial design. The seemingly heretical irreverence for these distinctions reflects the inevitable transformation of a deeply religious work into a cliché whose spiritual message has become muted through repetition. As Warhol's final series, The Last Supper serves as a powerful reiteration of the principles that informed his entire artistic enterprise. Andy Warhol's final series of paintings, "The Last Supper," which was made in late 1986 and is now on view at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, was a commission. The idea was hatched by the late Paris dealer, Alexander Iolas, who arranged for the work to be paid for by the Milan bank Credito-Valtellinese. The pictures were hung in the bank's new premises, just across the street from the Church of Santa Maria della Grazie, where Leonardo da Vinci's noble, dilapidated original can be seen. Warhol, as was his way, used commercial reproductions as his source material. The works have since been acquired by two heavy hitters of the art world, collector Peter Brant and Heiner Friedrich, the art dealer who was a progenitor of the Dia Center for the Arts. The paintings have been lent to the Guggenheim for what museum director Thomas Krens, another heavy hitter, describes as "an extended period of time." Big guns are firing here, or misfiring. "The Last Supper" suite is an anthology of Warhol riffs. The painting appears whole, as a double-silkscreened image, washed in the medicine-bottle hues he loved -- green, blue, yellow, rose-red -- and in details, executed by Warhol in deft outline. The show includes two big versions of the painting, Christ 112 Times, in which he repeated the image (as he had done from the very beginning of his post-commercial career, when he made paintings of repeated dollar bills). The sculptor George Segal later said of these paintings, "We were amused by that because this Japanese girl Yayoi Kusama was already at the Green Gallery with her repetitions of penises. So such ideas were in the air � when the dust finally settled, the one who said it best would be the one with the most conviction to deal with the idea." There is a black-light Last Supper, a camouflage Last Supper, a couple of almost unreadably Minimalist Last Suppers (one black on dense umber, one yellowy white on white), and various Last Suppers incorporating commercial logos for the likes of Camel \and Wise potato chips. The work is fastidiously hung in two long narrow galleries, lined with pillars (a few are painted gold) and with pale blond floorboards. It's a pretty lame show. I am an intense admirer of (much of) Warhol's work, but so insipid did I find this work, so lifeless, that it became interesting. So off does the work seem that it sheds light on that enigma: Warhol when he's on. Andy Warhol, I have always felt, was a kind of folk artist. Perhaps most artists in our times are essentially self-taught, but Warhol had an uncanny ability to pick images out of the cultural slipstream around him, and carpenter seductive, easy and all-too-available content together with cool, Minimalist form. Sometimes Warhol used "high" art as his raw material, most famously the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa is so over-known, so familiar from T-shirts, cartoons, ads, that -- like Rodin's Thinker, say, or van Gogh's Sunflowers -- it floats in the culture as an emblem, an advertisement for art, quite independently of its existence as a painting. Even Warhol's de Chiricos -- first shown in New York by Marisa del Re -- have a buzz, because de Chirico's surfaces are already sterile, like glazed biscuits, and he was such a faker of his own work that the Warhol versions have an acid bite. In his second bout with Leonardo, though, Andy Warhol does not come out a winner. It's not hard to see why. The Last Supper is, of course, a famous painting, but -- unlike Elvis, Liz, the Coke bottle, the Mona Lisa -- it is not an image you can get quickly, being long, narrow and very, very busy. Even when a detail is plucked out, as in Christ 112 Times, it is not a punchy "known" detail like, say, the hands of Michelangelo's God and Adam touching in the Sistine Chapel � and a zillion ads. Warhol's Christ seems wishy-washy, religiose -- an icon nobody quite knows. The Guggenheim press release, incidentally, notes of The Last Supper that "Warhol considered the project crucially important to his life and work. " It adds that "Although it is not widely known, Warhol was raised and remained a devout Catholic during his life ." I do not know where the writer acquired his first bit of information but the second is -- to say the least -- arguable. Warhol's life was incredibly widely publicized, and his religion along with it. His church going is a leitmotif in his published diaries. Bob Colacello's biography, a big seller, was actually called Holy Terror. But what effect, if any, did Warhol's religion have on the making of these pieces? Walking around the galleries, it was tempting to believe that perhaps it was the artist's beliefs that damped down the energy, that removed the dry sulfurous crackle of the best work and -- paradoxically -- made The Last Supper so spiritless. I found this possibility so intriguing that I returned to The Andy Warhol Diaries to check out the period in question. Now, granted the diaries were trimmed down from 20,000 pages and that the artist is not always forthcoming -- or truthful -- in what remains. But from the evidence, his Last Supper commission does not appear as some grand climacteric. Warhol's record of 1986 starts with some art biz as usual. He presents Sly Stallone with one of his ad-inspired paintings, Be Somebody with a Body (He would re-use this motif in one of The Last Suppers in this show). Arnold Schwarzenegger dithered over whether or not he wanted to commission a wedding portrait of Maria Shriver. Warhol went to the 75th birthday of the Oreo cookie and got truly excited at the notion of getting booked to paint the iconic treat. "When the cameras were on I ate the cookies and said, 'Miss Oreo needs her portrait done' he told his amanuensis Pat Hackett. "So I hope the bigwigs get the hint. Oh, it would be so good to do." Warhol first mentions his Last Supper show briefly in a November entry, then moves briskly on to a discussion about doing paintings of mineral water bottles for Michel Roux, creator of the Absolut campaign. Warhol arrived in Milan on January 21, 1987. He noted, "My Last Supper show was closing down that day and my other show was opening, so there was lots of publicity. " That is the second and last mention of the work. It was in Milan, too, that Warhol felt the first twinge of the gallbladder problem that would result in his death. He pretended, even to his diary, that it was the flu. Back in New York, there was an Italian shoe manufacturer who wanted his portrait done, and there were curtains to be done for the New York City Ballet. But Warhol died early on the morning of Sunday, Feb. 22. Was The Last Supper series Andy Warhol's last completed suite of paintings? Absolutely. Was it a deeply felt final coda? I don't think so.