I’ve got these desperate feelings that nothing means anything.
modernist art, commissioned Warhol to create a series of paintings
Warhol’s Confession: Love, Faith, and AIDS
A ing contemporary issues of technology and politics while appropri-
Jessica Beck
And then I decide that I should try to fall in love, and that’s
what I’m doing now with Jon Gould, but then it’s just too hard.
—Andy Warhol, diary entry, 1981
I’m going to the doctor who puts crystals on you and it gives
you energy. . . . Jon’s gotten interested in that kind of stuff—he
says it gives you “powers,” and I think it sounds like a good
thing to be doing. Health is wealth.
—Andy Warhol, diary entry, 1981
Nearly thirty years have passed since Warhol’s retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art in 1989, and the perception of his work and
legacy has shifted quite dramatically. Warhol the queer artist, Warhol
the filmmaker, and Warhol the photographer have all emerged in new
lights.1 If Robert Rosenblum, in his catalogue essay for that first ret-
rospective, “Warhol as Art History,” could pitch the artist as a painter
situated safely within the canon, the discourse has now expanded to
recognize the sexual and transgressive nature of Warhol’s practice
through a discussion of queer politics and cultural studies.2 While the
literature has blossomed since the 1990s, a need for revision remains:
there has been a tendency to stretch Warhol to please the needs of
various postmodernist camps, and repetition in the narrative has led
to a scholarly imbalance, an almost fetishistic focus on Warhol’s
output of the 1960s. His final paintings are neglected and rejected
and a serious investigation has yet to be undertaken. In particular,
the divide between the readings of the “queer Warhol” and of the
“religious Warhol” has perpetuated a misunderstanding of his Last
Supper paintings and his response to the aids epidemic. What would
it look like if these two camps merged?
In the final decade of his life, sparked by collaborations with
younger artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, Warhol
returned to painting by hand, on a dramatic scale, and with new
energy. He also spent this period sealing his place in the canon, engag-
ating details from Renaissance and modern masters ranging from
Botticelli and Raphael to de Chirico. No theme compares in number
to the nearly one hundred works in Warhol’s Last Supper series, pro-
duced between 1985 and 1986. The dilemma in the current literature
on these paintings is that it often makes little reference, and sometimes
no reference at all, to the major crisis affecting Warhol’s community
at the time of their completion: the aids crisis. The ambiguity in the
writing on the last decade of Warhol’s career stems in part from the
conflict between his Byzantine Catholic faith and his homosexuality.
This tension is often ignored in discussions of the work, with the result
that the paintings appear one dimensional. Warhol made productive
use of this tension across his entire career, alternately flaunting and
concealing his sexuality in his work. Once these issues are brought to
the forefront, a broader concern with mourning and salvation emerges
as the crux of the Last Supper paintings.
In 1984, the art dealer Alexander Iolas, an Egyptian-born former
ballet dancer and an eccentric collector of Surrealist and other early
84 85
A. Pink Last Supper, 1986. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 78 x 306 x 2 in. (198.1 x 777.2 x 5.1 cm). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection,
and prints based on Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic Last Supper. Warhol’s
final exhibition during his lifetime, Warhol—Il Cenacolo, featured at
least twenty of these works and was staged in 1987 in the refectory of
Milan’s Palazzo delle Stelline, which then housed the bank Credito
Valtellinese.3 The venue was selected for its proximity to Leonardo’s
masterwork, which was painted in 1495–98 just across the street, in
the refectory of the Dominican cloister Santa Maria delle Grazie.4
While Warhol exhibited a modest sampling of paintings and prints
in Milan, he had spent a year, from 1985 and 1986, producing nearly
one hundred additional renditions of The Last Supper.5 The commis-
sion, the last of the artist’s career, became a near obsession for him.
In prophetic fashion, these images of the eve of Christ’s crucifixion
marked the end of Warhol’s own career and, indeed, his life. Just a
month after returning to New York from the opening in Milan, he was
admitted to the hospital for gallbladder surgery and died.
Warhol’s production in relation to The Last Supper is remarkable
for its quantity and diversity, including works on paper, large-scale
paintings, and even the sculpture Ten Punching Bags (Last Supper)
(1985–86), a collaborative work created with Basquiat. Warhol
employed two distinct methods and styles in these works: one in which
he stayed closer to Leonardo’s original by screenprinting a photograph
of an engraving of the mural on canvas, the other in which he departed
from it by combining hand-painted images of Christ with commercial
logos and text pulled from newspaper headlines and advertisements.
Ultimately both versions present commentaries on suffering, one
through repetition, the other through signs and symbols.
Few works of art are as celebrated and studied as The Last
Supper, yet the original as Leonardo executed it on the refectory
wall has not existed for more than five hundred years.6 Painted
with an experimental technique on dry plaster, the image began to
deteriorate within a few years after its completion. Shifting trends in
conservation and decades of painstaking repair have only succeeded
in salvaging select details. Yet time has not muted the emotional
vibrancy of the disciples, or the complexity of the perspectival
lines and dueling gestures among the figures’ hands and feet, which
symbolically point within and beyond the pictorial field. No matter
how faded by age, these elements continue to perplex and inspire
art enthusiasts and scholars worldwide. Art historian Leo Steinberg
contended that the strength of Leonardo’s masterwork lies in its
inherent duplicity: since the nineteenth century, writers have argued
over which event—the revelation of Christ’s betrayer or the cele-
bration of the Eucharist—is more clearly indexed by the dramatic
gestures among the disciples.7 Adding to the sustained interest in
the work is the way it’s studied, often from copies—engravings and
other reproductions—that have varied over time as the original has
deteriorated. Leonardo’s Last Supper is a kind of meaning machine.8
Warhol’s screenprinted canvases from 1986, such as Pink Last
Supper (fig. A), Camouflage Last Supper (page TK), and Sixty Last
Suppers, are sophisticated paintings that oscillate between flatness
and illusionistic depth, ideas that lie at the heart of Renaissance
painting. His source for these canvases was a photograph of a print
contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
similar to a widely distributed engraving made in 1800 by Raphael
Morghen; the hand-painted series, meanwhile, drew from an image
in the Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings (fig. B), first published
in 1885.9 In the way he looked to these sources, his process was not
so dissimilar from that of the scholars and enthusiasts before him:
many celebrated writers of the Enlightenment, for example, such as
Goethe, based their studies on Morghen’s engraving, a copy that left
out the symbolic wine glass under Christ’s right hand.10 (Morghen
himself created his famous engraving from a drawing by another
artist, who in turn seems to have been working from a drawing by
another artist still.)11 Warhol, who worked throughout his career with
reproductions as source material, understood the inevitable loss or
change of meaning in the facsimile. He also understood how a repro-
duction can exist in suspended time. By the 1980s, he had fully
embraced contemporary media—television, photography, and even
the Amiga computer—and had launched his own television show,
Warhol TV, which aired from 1980 to 1982. Culture as mediated
experience is the appropriate lens through which to view these paint-
ings. In his handling of color—pink, red, yellow, and camouflage—or
of repetition, as in the expansive canvas Sixty Last Suppers (fig. C),
with its abutting black-and-white rectangles that look like stacks
of miniature television screens, Warhol created a meditation on the
shifting nature of death and suffering in the face of modern media.
These were only the latest episodes in a sustained engagement with
the fusion of mourning and media that he started in the early 1960s
with his Death and Disaster series, which framed death through a
screenprinting technique mirroring the 16mm filmstrip.
Warhol created these paintings, among his most celebrated, in
early 1963 through 1964, copying scenes of suicides and car accidents
from periodicals such as Newsweek and Life. For a suicide painting
completed in 1963, 1947 White (fig. D), he sourced a Life photo by
Robert Wiles of a young woman—Evelyn McHale, a twenty-three-
year-old model—who had leapt to her death from the eighty-sixth
floor of the Empire State Building.12 The young beauty landed on
the roof of a limousine, where the vehicle’s twisted metal perfectly
cradled her fall, leaving her body miraculously unmarked and her
posture frozen like a sleeping beauty. Warhol printed this image in
an overlapping sequence that mirrors the shape and structure of the
filmstrip. The repetition and movement in works like this one heighten
and disrupt the trauma of the original event: the victims take on saint-
like qualities as their suffering becomes beautiful.
As if revisiting this technique, Warhol printed his Last Supper
paintings with a similar formal reference to the moving image, specifi-
cally the cube of a television screen. Through the shadowed abstraction
in Camouflage Last Supper and the tightly framed grid in Sixty Last
Suppers, repetition and printing techniques both nullify and heighten
the spiritual strength of the original image. In 1947 White, Warhol
had overlapped the frames of the silkscreen and had created a sense
of movement by printing the image from light to dark, a visual effect
that mirrored the flicker and motion of a filmstrip; in Sixty Last Suppers
and other works the repetition is static, locking the image in time.
The logic of this shift may reflect the moment at which these
JESSICA BECK
images were frozen, a moment of public suffering for the homosexual
body. In the 1980s, branded in the media as the primary bearer of aids,
the gay male body became a symbol of moral and physical decay.
Because the spectacle of aids involved repeated images of the with-
ered and wrinkled bodies of the ill, as Simon Watney has argued, “any
possibility of positive sympathetic identification with actual people
with aids [was] entirely expunged from the field of vision”; instead,
political and public commentary on the crisis “relayed between the
image of the miraculous authority of clinical medicine and the faces
and bodies of individuals who clearly disclose the stigmata of their
guilt.” “The principal target of this sadistically punitive gaze,” Watney
continues, “was the body of the homosexual.”13
Created at the height of the aids crisis, Warhol’s Last Supper series
generated a startling number of works showing the face of Christ and
the eve of his death. Given the punitive rhetoric directed at homosex- B
ual men during this period, it is surprising that what scholarship exists
on the series has been notably silent on the cultural climate of their
creation. The author responsible for the most extensive writing on
Warhol’s religious works is Jane Daggett Dillenberger, whose research
traces a trajectory from the artist’s Byzantine Catholic upbringing in
Pittsburgh to the Last Supper commission. Dillenberger, a theologian
as well as an art historian, seems to have found aids taboo, since she
makes no reference to the epidemic in her book.14 It is not only in
the work of traditional art historians and scholars of religion, how-
ever, that Warhol’s response to the aids epidemic is misunderstood;
contemporary theorists have neglected this topic as well. The first
collection of critical essays on the queer politics of Warhol’s work,
Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996), maintains a near silence on Warhol’s
religious life. Here, Jonathan Flatley, in an otherwise persuasive essay
on the complexities of identification in Warhol’s practice, argues that C
Warhol failed the aids movement with his “depressing” depiction of
the crisis in his 1985–86 canvas aids, Jeep, Bicycle (page TK).15 But
Warhol’s commingling of commercial branding and images of Christ
in these works commented on the cultural climate of the time in ways
that even the most thoughtful commentators have overlooked.
By the early 1980s, the aids epidemic was beginning to gain
public recognition in major cities in the United States and abroad,
mainly New York, San Francisco, and Paris. The syndrome first came
to wide public notice with an article in the New York Times in 1981
under the headline “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” which
shared reports from doctors in New York and San Francisco who were
diagnosing homosexual men with a rapidly fatal form of cancer.16
Out of the forty-one patients tested, eight died less than twenty-four
months after the diagnosis. Panic and anxiety spread quickly within
the homosexual community and the term “gay cancer” was adopted
to describe the disease. By May 1982 the Times had firmly connected
the disease with homosexual communities through the headline “New
Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials.”17 Headlines from
1981 onward became more alarming as public figures and celebrities,
most famously Rock Hudson, began to die of aids.
The first mention of “gay cancer” in Warhol’s diaries came on
February 6, 1982, not even a year after the New York Times article,
D
B. Last Supper and Beethoven, c. 1985. Printed ink on paper and masking tape on cardboard, 11 3⁄4 x 15 1⁄2 in. (29.8 x 39.4 cm). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh;
Founding Collection, contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. C. Sixty Last Suppers, 1986. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 116 x 393 in.
(294.6 x 998.2 cm). Private collection. D. 1947 White, 1963. Silkscreen ink and graphite on linen, 121 x 78 in. (307.3 x 198.1 cm). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh;
86 87 Founding Collection, contribution Dia Center for the Arts
 in reference to Joe MacDonald, a male model whom the artist had
photographed in the 1970s and who would die of aids in 1983. Warhol
recounts,
I went to Jan Cowles’s place at 810 Fifth Avenue where she was
having a birthday party for her son Charlie. . . . Joe MacDonald
was there, but I didn’t want to be near him and talk to him
because he just had gay cancer. I talked to his brother’s wife.18
Just a few months later he referenced the New York Times directly in
a diary entry from May 11, 1982:
The New York Times had a big article about gay cancer, and
how they don’t know what to do with it. That it’s epidemic
proportions and they say that these kids who have sex all the
time have it in their semen and they’ve already had every
kind of disease there is—hepatitis one, two and three, and
mononucleosis, and I’m worried that I could get it by drinking
out of the same glass or just being around these kids who go
to the Baths.19
In each of the eight references to “gay cancer” in The Andy Warhol
Diaries, Warhol expresses fear of contracting the disease from the
most casual of encounters, and the underlying tone of his remarks is
loaded with judgment.20
Warhol’s anxiety about health and illness had started during his
youth, with an early onset of Saint Vitus’s Dance, and his fear of
hospitals unquestionably mounted after his shooting in 1968. But his
attention to health, alternative medicines, and physical fitness peaked
in the 1980s, a period of growing public paranoia over aids and of the
social targeting of homosexual men. His work began to reflect these
worries between 1985 and 1986, in paintings such as Be a Somebody
with a Body (page TK), which juxtaposes bodybuilding imagery with
benevolent images of Christ—the same Christ seen in the Last Supper
works. Given Warhol’s preoccupation with disease and illness, it
is easy to imagine the shock he would have felt in 1984, when he
found out that his then-boyfriend, Jon Gould, had been admitted to
the hospital with pneumonia. A little more than two years later, in
September of 1986, Gould died from aids, at the age of thirty-three.
Despite an age difference of twenty-five years, Gould and Warhol
E were involved for five years, traveling together, working together, and,
for a short period, living together (fig. E). When Gould met Warhol,
he had just landed a competitive producing position with Paramount
Pictures. A former student in Harvard’s Radcliffe Publishing Program
and from a wealthy New England family, he had a certain pedigree
that attracted the artist. As Bob Colacello would write, “Old money,
Harvard, Hollywood—it was a resume that Andy couldn’t resist. And
there was something else about Jon Gould that drew Andy toward
him: like Jed [Johnson], he had a twin brother named Jay.”21 Johnson
was an aspiring interior designer who had worked for Warhol at the
Factory and famously had decorated the artist’s townhouse. Before
becoming involved with Gould, Warhol had dated Johnson (twenty
JESSICA BECK 88 89
years his junior) for twelve years. Given the time they spent together,
it’s surprising to read how passive Warhol’s mentions of him are in
the diaries. By stark contrast, Warhol was infatuated with Gould,
and his writing on him sometimes has a tone of desperation. In an
entry of June 12, 1981, just six months into their relationship, Warhol
writes candidly,
Jon was back in town and he said he thought I was going away
so he’d made plans to go away for the weekend and so I guess
my whole relationship’s fallen apart. He said he’d call me and
didn’t, which was mean. I have to pull myself together and go
on. I have to get a whole new philosophy. I don’t know what
to do. I watched Urban Cowboy, and John Travolta just dances
so beautifully. It was a really good movie. A Paramount movie,
so that made me think more about Jon and I felt worse. I cried
myself to sleep.22
Beyond the hundred entries in the diaries, Gould is the most pho-
tographed subject of Warhol’s late career, appearing in more than
four hundred of the 3,600 contact sheets the artist produced between
1976 and 1987.23 Warhol’s interest in Gould’s muscular physique and
youthful athletic acumen is apparent in hundreds of photographs of
Gould shirtless, jogging, and sunbathing.
Gould was a complicated figure in Warhol’s life and a source of
tension within his close-knit circle of employees. Infighting was part
of the culture of Warhol’s circle. Stories of disputes between Gould
and the photographer Christopher Makos, the friend and matchmaker
responsible for introducing Warhol to Gould, are well recorded in the
diaries, and, unsurprisingly, Warhol seemed to thrive on the jealousy.
What he seemed most to appreciate was Gould’s closeted sexual-
ity, his insistence on hiding their relationship. Warhol writes in the
diaries, “I love going out with Jon because it’s like being on a real
date—he’s tall and strong and I feel that he can take care of me. And
it’s exciting because he acts straight so I’m sure people think he is.”24
This form of secrecy fit in perfectly with Warhol’s lifelong practice
of both flaunting and concealing his own sexuality. Their relationship
also satisfied his concern with putting his love interests to work: the
possibility of using Gould to land a movie deal at Paramount, and
the blurring of work with pleasure, was part of the mystery of their
love affair. As Warhol reveals in the diaries,
Oh, but from now on I can’t talk personally about Jon to the
Diary because when I told him I did, he got mad and told me
not to ever do it again, that if I ever put anything personal
about him in the Diary he’d stop seeing me. So from now on,
it’ll just be the business angle in the Diary—he’ll just be a
person who works for Paramount Pictures who I’m trying to
do scripts and movies with.25
Work for Warhol was the perfect shield for concealing his feelings
and sexuality.26
Given the emotional tenor of Warhol’s writing on Gould in the
E. Jon Gould and Warhol, c. 1982
diaries, his anxiety over the discovery that the aids virus had been
incubating in the body of the young man whose bed he had shared
seems undeniable. The details of their physical intimacy have been
the subject of rumors and speculation, but it is to some degree irrele-
vant here, since Warhol, and much of the public at the time, believed
that aids could be transmitted by casual contact.27 In the published
edition of the diaries, the first mention of Warhol’s knowledge of
Gould’s illness appears as an editor’s note inserted into the entry for
February 4, 1984, the dueling voices in the passage functioning like
the slippages and tears in the Deaths and Disaster series:
Did a personal errand with Jon, but he made me promise not to
put anything personal about him in the Diary. [Jon Gould was
admitted to New York Hospital with pneumonia on February
4, 1984, and released on February 22. He was readmitted the
next day, however, and released again on March 7. On that day
Andy instructed his housekeepers Nena and Aurora: “From
now on, wash Jon’s dishes and clothes separate from mine.”]28
Warhol’s inability to speak about or record loss in the diaries is the
mirror of his depiction of death in the Deaths and Disasters. The
slippages and tears on these canvases from 1963 and 1964, his most
celebrated depictions of death, function, Hal Foster has argued, as
a form of “traumatic realism.” For Foster, the work repeats a trau-
matic image of the “real” in order to defend against it by draining
it of significance, but the “real” nevertheless pokes through, in the
form of a repeated emotional detail or technical flaw. “Repetition in
Warhol,” he writes, “is not reproduction in the sense of representation
(of a referent) or simulation (of a pure image, a detached signifier).
Rather, repetition serves to screen the real understood as traumatic.”29
Foster compares this underlying current to Roland Barthes’s idea of
the punctum, the element in a photograph that “rises from the scene,
shoots out like an arrow, and pierces me.”30
This process of screening the traumatic is also at work in the dia-
ries, which, like the Time Capsules (1974–87) present an obsessive
recording of daily life and a false sense of intimacy. In the published
version, the endless entries of the mundane—taxi receipts, dinner
checks, party invitations, gossip—work to repress the real, while
editor’s notes such as those on Gould’s illness, and later on his death,
rupture the illusion to reveal a slippage of truth, piercing like the
punctum to let the “real” through:
Susan Pile called and said she got a job at Twentieth Century
Fox that starts in October, so she’s leaving Paramount. And
the Diary can write itself on the other news from L.A., which I
don’t want to talk about. [Note: Jon Gould died on September
18th at age thirty-three after “an extended illness.” He was
down to seventy pounds and he was blind. He denied even to
close friends that he had aids.]31
In entries like this one, the outside world intrudes upon the fantasy
of intimacy in the diaries, and the crisis in Warhol’s personal life
JESSICA BECK
becomes all the more clear from what goes unsaid. Consideration of
the sociopolitical climate in which Warhol was producing the Last
Supper paintings, and of his private relationship with Gould, allows
the link between aids and these works to start to emerge. In fact he
began the series, which would turn out to be his last, within days of
Gould’s death.32
The tension between Warhol’s sexuality and his religious life has
its fullest expression in paintings such as The Last Supper (The Big
C) (1986; fig. F), in which signs and symbols create a private refer-
ence to aids. Hand-painted via a projection process, like paintings
of 1961–62 such as Before and After, Wigs, and Dr. Scholl’s Corns,
the canvas is left partly unfinished and Warhol employs a light touch
with an abstract brushstroke. On this canvas the figure of Christ recurs
four times, while hands appear repeatedly. Thomas’s finger pointing
to the sky, intimating that heaven knows he is free of guilt, appears
prominently next to the “eye” in the Wise potato-chip logo.33 F
Pulled from a New York Post headline, the phrase “The Big C”
appears under Christ’s face in the lower-left center of the canvas. For
Dillenberger the phrase references Warhol’s fear of cancer, but this
account tells only half the story. The source material for the painting,
in the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, is a collage
made up of headlines from the New York Post, motorcycle ads, and
clippings reading “the Big C” and “aids” cut from a front-page article
in the Post (fig. G). Warhol ultimately left out the aids headline while
keeping the more covert “The Big C,” but given the direct references
to “gay cancer” in his diaries, it becomes clear that this image of
Christ was connected for him to the rapid rate at which people were
dying around him. “The Big C” was synonymous with aids. The Last
Supper (The Big C) reflects on sex and shame through appropriated
images of Christ’s betrayal, the piercing owl’s eye (the Wise logo),
and the numbers 699, appropriated from a price tag—$6.99—but
indexing both the sexual position “69” and the “mark of the beast,”
666, in the Book of Revelations. Even the details of Christ’s feet at
the far right of the canvas seem to point to the notion of punishment:
for Steinberg, writing on Leonardo’s Last Supper, “as [Christ’s feet]
G
rejoin the rest of the body, they foreshadow it glorified; and they
foreshadow it crucified.”34 The image of Christ offering his flesh in
the Eucharist was a symbol of salvation during a time of suffering,
an unusually personal and emotional image for Warhol. In keeping
with the complexities of his construction of death in the Death and
Disasters, and with its repression in the diaries, the painting speaks
of sex and of judgment. It is an allegorical triangulation of mourning,
punishment, and fear.
Warhol’s one canvas referencing aids directly, aids/Jeep/Bicycle,
is misrepresented by Flatley’s description of it as the artist’s only
response to the crisis.35 Seen apart from the Last Supper works, this
painting may feel like an anomaly, with its unusual juxtaposition
of seemingly disparate objects. It is a large canvas, nearly nine feet
across, and its broad sweeping brushstrokes, drips and droplets, unfin-
ished look, and mix of advertising images and newspaper headlines—
one of them an oversized headline about aids—mirror the style of H
contemporaneous paintings such as The Last Supper (The Big C)
F. The Last Supper (The Big C), 1986. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 116 x 390 x 2 in. (294.6 x 990.6 x 5.1 cm). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, con-
tribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. G. Collage (photocopies of newspaper headlines and advertisements), 1985–86. Photocopies and tape, 22 x 19 7⁄8 in.
(55.9 x 50.5 cm) overall. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. H. Double $5/Weightlifter, 1985–
90 91 86. Acrylic on linen, 116 x 216 1⁄2 in. (294.6 x 549.9 cm). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
 and the large Double $5/Weightlifter (fig. H). The source material
for aids/Jeep/Bicycle, in the archives of The Andy Warhol Museum,
unlocks the connection between it and the Last Supper series. A col-
lage of taped-together source material for The Last Supper (The Big
C) includes the same New York Post headline used in that painting,
so that the two works function as sister canvases. Warhol’s allegori-
cal response to the epidemic becomes more obvious when these two
works are considered in concert.
Warhol—Il Cenacolo, the first exhibition of the Last Supper series,
in Milan in 1987, came at a moment when the disease was manifesting
powerfully within Warhol’s direct circle. Iolas, the gallerist who gave
him both his first exhibition, in New York in 1952, and as it turned
out his last, Warhol—Il Cenacolo, died of aids just five months after
the opening of the Milan show. When the show opened, in January of
1987, Iolas was in the advanced stages of illness and was relegated
to a sanatorium. Warhol surely felt that the disease was surrounding
him. Death, which Warhol had portrayed through saintlike beauty in
1947 White and surreal crucifixion in White Burning Car (1963), is
embodied in the depiction of Christ in the Last Supper paintings as
a personal mediation on shame and salvation.
Discussing Warhol’s work in Pop Out, Flatley explores the com-
plex workings of identification, what he calls the “poetics of public-
ity,” and the “intimate relation” between portraiture and mourning
through a process of negation and embodiment, between “being
public and being a body.” As he states, Warhol understood that “to
become public or feel public was in many ways to acquire the sort
of distance from oneself that comes with imagining oneself dead.”36
This argument holds true for much of the artist’s work—the Marilyn
Monroe paintings, for example, which hollow out their references
to the star while memorializing her death. There is an oversight in
Flatley’s scholarship, though: his dismissal of Warhol’s handling of
the aids epidemic. He claims that Warhol’s “failure to address aids
surely stemmed in part from his phobic and shame-filled relation to
illness.”37 It is true that Warhol had a lifelong, conflicted concern with
illness and health, expressed in his diaries and in autobiographical
books such as Popism (1980). But his shame was rooted in the physi-
cal expression of illness, and in the daily trauma involved in trying to
hide his blotchy, two-toned complexion and the severe scarring from
the surgeries resulting from his shooting. His response to aids was
intimately connected to both his religious faith and his concealment
of his sexuality. In fact Warhol’s response fits well with Flatley’s
I overarching argument about Warhol’s insights into the public con-
sumption of images. In the face of a spectacle devoid of compassion-
ate or positive images of people living with aids, Warhol’s response
wasn’t a failure but a confession of love and fear and an expression
of mourning. He gave aids a face—the mournful face of Christ.
The source collage for The Last Supper (The Big C) and aids/Jeep/
Bicycle, a hybrid of advertisements, bears a significant resemblance
to some of Warhol’s earliest source material from 1961. That year,
for his first Pop paintings, he cut headlines and advertisements from
such tabloids as the National Enquirer and assembled the clippings
into two collages, tabular images of sexual and spiritual desire. The
JESSICA BECK 92
ads—“Make Him Want You,” “How to Pray,” “Skinny?” “Do You
Want Power,” “With God,” “Learn Meat Cutting,” “He-Man Voice!”
and “reach! for Greater Protection”—read like a list of repressed
wish-fulfillments for Warhol, who in 1961 was undergoing a physical
and professional transformation (fig. I).38 In 1957 he had sought plas-
tic surgery to reshape his nose, had started wearing wigs to cover his
hair loss, and had discarded his “Raggedy Andy” suits for a trendier
look of sunglasses, narrow ties, and tighter suits, all in the pursuit of
assimilating into the hypermasculine and exclusive circles of the New
York art world. His first canvases—works such as Before and After
(page TK), Wigs (page TK), and Strong Arms and Broad Shoulders,
created before the now famous Campbell’s Soup Cans paintings of
1962—focused on beauty, pain, transformation, and assimilation.
The pairing of coded sexual language, in phrases such as “Make Him
Want You” and “Learn Meat Cutting,” with instructional advertise-
ments for prayer and divine power is echoed in Warhol’s choices of
black-and-white advertisements over twenty years later, in 1985–86,
when he was working on the Last Supper series. Such paintings as
Heaven and Hell Are One Breath Away (1985–86), The Mark of the
Beast (1985–86), and Repent and Sin No More! (1985–86) bring faith
and sexuality together again, this time at a moment of intense public
scrutiny of homosexuality during the moral crisis of the aids epidemic.
The crisis during the early stages of the epidemic was not simply
one of images but one of language. As Paula A. Treichler has argued,
the confusion emerged from a deep symbolic constriction of how we
think and speak about disease.39 The scientific and medical commu-
nities were subject to the same metaphors and biases as the general
population. As Treichler writes, “There is a continuum, then, not a
dichotomy, between popular and biomedical discourses . . . ‘a con-
tinuum between controversies in daily life and those occurring in the
laboratory,’ and these play out in language.”40 The ambiguity of the
medical community’s language on the transmission and prevention
of aids contributed to a rapid outbreak of fear and rumor in the gen-
eral public. At the same time, the media and the medical community
employed an overabundance of judgmental, moralistic, and religious
language in their discussion of aids. In the early stages of the outbreak,
for instance, cases in New York hospitals were referred to as “wogs:
the Wrath of God Syndrome.”41 More important, the contracting of
aids was understood as the result of deviant behavior, whether through
multiple sex partners, drug use, or prostitution. Given the manner in
which this shame-based rhetoric took root in the public consciousness,
Warhol’s juxtapositions of Christ with references to “gay cancer” and
aids become a clear response to the crisis.
Once we situate Warhol’s late works within the aids epidemic, his
series of black-and-white advertisement paintings take on a prescient
tone in relation to the culture of fear that the crisis was creating.
Private sexual lifestyles were becoming the subject of public scrutiny.
The Mark of the Beast (page TK), Repent and Sin No More!, and
other works from this series point to the moralistic assault directed
at gay men by the media, which often positioned them as deviant and
deserving of the full punishment of this silent killer. The image of a
hand branded with the numbers 666 points not only to the sarcoma
I. Nine Ads, 1960. Graphite and collaged newspaper on paper, 13 7/8 x 11 1/2 in. (35.2 x 29.2 cm). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection,
93
that often accompanied the virus but also to the violence of the peri-
od’s public discourse, which had produced the threat of branding
or tattooing HIV-positive homosexuals.42 This violence permeated
Warhol’s personal and professional world.
In March 1987, just a month after Warhol’s death, Larry Kramer
founded the aids Coalition to Unleash Power (act up). A year later,
Douglas Crimp published aids: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism,
a special edition of the journal October, while artist collectives like
Gran Fury fought to reposition the spectacle of aids from associa-
tions of isolation and shame to assertions of strength and community.
Warhol’s hand-painted religious works, created just before this period
of activism and resistance, went unshown during his lifetime and
were crafted in his studio without the direction of a commission or a
gallery show. The scholarly discourse that has positioned his work as
a “failure” in the face of the aids crisis results in part from insufficient
research and more still from a dismissal of the complexities of his
lived experience as both a homosexual and a Byzantine Catholic, and
of the deep conflicts visible in his work between illness and physical
perfection.
In this broader view, it seems fitting that Warhol’s interpretation of
the aids crisis would find its most complete expression in depictions
of Christ and the Last Supper. More than a demonstration of reverence
for Leonardo’s masterwork, or even an unveiling of his own Catholic
faith, Warhol’s Last Supper paintings are a confession of the conflict
he felt between his faith and his sexuality, and ultimately a plea for
salvation from the suffering to which the homosexual community was
subjected during these years. aids had generated a new way to brand
the bodies of homosexual men as frightening symbols of moral decay
and targets for punishment. From this perspective, these paintings
can be understood as some of the most personal and revealing works
of Warhol’s career. His response to the crisis, a deeply personal one,
was in plain view, right on the surface of his canvases.
Notes
1. See, respectively, Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and Josè Esteban Muñoz,
eds., Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996);
Douglas Crimp, Our Kind of Movie: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2012) and Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The
Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Harry N. Abrams and
the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006); and Andy Warhol Photography,
exh. cat, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and Hamburg Kunsthalle (Zurich:
Stemmle Publishers, 1999).
2. See Crimp, “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” Social Text, no. 59 (Summer
1999): 49–56. See also Robert Rosenblum, “Warhol as Art History,” in Kynaston
McShine, Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1989), pp. 25–37.
3. There are discrepancies in the record on the number of works in the exhibition:
the catalogue lists twenty but Corinna Thierolf cites a conversation with a conser-
vator to suggest that there were twenty-two. See her “All the Catholic Things,”
in Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, ed., Andy Warhol: The Last Supper (Ostfildern-Ruit,
Germany: Cantz, 1998), p. 48, n. 13.
4. See ibid., p. 23.
5. Jane Daggett Dillenberger cites this number, which would surely include works
contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
on paper, sculpture, and paintings. See Dillenberger, “Preface,” in The Religious
Art of Andy Warhol (New York: Continuum, 1998), p. 10.
6. See Sarah Boxer, “The Many Veils of Meaning Left by Leonardo,” New York
Times, July 14, 2001, available online at www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/books/
the-many-veils-of-meaning-left-by-leonardo.html (accessed November 26, 2017).
7. See Leo Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant “Last Supper” (New York: Zone
Books), 2001.
8. See Boxer, “The Many Veils of Meaning Left by Leonardo.”
9. See Thierolf, All the Catholic Things, pp. 23–24.
10. See Steinberg, “The Subject,” in Leonardo’s Incessant “Last Supper,” p. 36.
11. See John Denison Champlin, ed., Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings, vol.
3 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1887), p. 32. Available online at https://
archive.org/stream/cyclopediaofpain005381mbp#page/n11/mode/2up (accessed
March 5, 2018).
12. See Ben Cosgrove, “‘The Most Beautiful Suicide’: A Violent Death, an Immortal
Photo,” Time, March 19, 2014, available online at http://time.com/3456028/the-
most-beautiful-suicide-a-violent-death-an-immortal-photo/ (accessed November
26, 2017).
13. Simon Watney, “The Spectacle of aids,” in Douglas Crimp, ed., aids: Cultural
Analysis, Cultural Activism (Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1998), p. 78.
14. Dillenberger, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol. Dillenberger refers to aids
just once, and this in relation to Warhol’s Skulls of the early 1970s. She states,
“The resurgence of skull imagery accompanied punk culture and is related to anx-
iety over the spread of aids as well as the escalating threats of nuclear war and
ecological disasters.” The connection is odd, since aids did not surface in public
consciousness until the early 1980s. Ibid., p. 71.
15..Flatley, “Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of Prosopopoeia,”
in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, pp. 119–23.
16. Lawrence K. Altman, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” New York
Times, July 3, 1981, available online at www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-can-
cer-seen-in-41-homosexuals.html (accessed November 27, 2017).
17. Altman, “New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials,” New York
Times, May 11, 1982, available online at www.nytimes.com/1982/05/11/science/
new-homosexual-disorder-worries-health-officials.html?pagewanted=all (accessed
November 27, 2017).
18. “Saturday, February 6, 1982,” in The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett
(New York: Warner Books, 1989), p. 429.
19. “Tuesday, May 11, 1982,” in ibid., p. 442.
20. Ibid., pp. 429, 432, 442, 460, 461, 469, 472, 739.
21. Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: Random
House, 1990), p. 585.
22. “Friday, June 12, 1981,” in The Andy Warhol Diaries, p. 387.
23. Amy DiPasquale, archivist, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, tele-
phone conversation with the author, November 2017.
24. “Thursday, April 30, 1981,” in The Andy Warhol Diaries, p. 377.
25. “Monday, May 25, 1981—East Falmouth—New York,” in ibid., p. 383.
26. Warhol mixed his personal relationships with work from his very beginnings in
New York, when his career as a commercial artist involved help from his mother,
Julia Warhola, and one of his earliest boyfriends, Ed Wallowitch, a photographer
who was involved with him in the late 1950s. Warhol used Wallowitch’s photo-
graphs as source material for his early Campbell’s Soup paintings. See George
Frei and Neil Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, Paintings
and Sculpture 1961–1963 (New York: Phaidon Press, 2002), pp. 95–96.
27. On the public and medical confusion around the spread of aids, and the public
perception of casual contamination, see Paula A. Treichler, “aids, Homophobia,
and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” in Crimp, aids:
Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, pp. 31–70. Many people in Warhol’s circle,
including Bob Colacello, Christopher Makos, and Halston, expressed doubts that
the relationship between Warhol and Gould was sexual. Colacello for example
writes, “Jon Gould told Katy Dobbs that his relationship with Andy was ‘asex-
ual,’ explaining that ‘the shooting had affected Andy’s sex life, because he was
embarrassed by his body, with all the scars, and was uncomfortable a lot and in
pain.’ Halston said he thought that the most that ever happened in Montauk ‘was
JESSICA BECK / WARHOL IN MOURNING
while Jon was taking a shower, Andy probably looked at him and got, you know,
some satisfaction.’” Colacello, Holy Terror, p. 626. The details of Warhol’s sexual
life and relationships are often neglected throughout the discourse, from early
boyfriends such as Wallowitch and Alfred Carlton Willers to the young Danny
Williams. With Gould, the doubt seemed to stem mostly from a general sense of
fear and jealousy among members of Warhol’s circle, who worried that the artist
would be taken advantage of by a younger man. Colacello, Makos, and Vincent
Fremont all expressed resentment over the attention that Warhol gave to Gould,
whether by including him in business meetings or by showering him with gifts,
party invitations, and even works of art. Even if we entertain the unfortunate myth
that Warhol’s sex life was asexual and voyeuristic, which is hard to believe given
his and Gould’s living arrangements, it is irrelevant because the public rhetoric of
aids at this moment was so potent and confusing. In any case, I find the narrative
of Warhol’s asexuality unproductive in exploring the full spectrum of his private
and professional life.
28. “Saturday, February 4, 1984,” in The Andy Warhol Diaries, p. 552.
29. Hal Foster, “Return of the Real,” in Foster, Return of the Real (Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001), p. 132.
30. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981), p. 26.
31. “Sunday, September 21, 1986,” in The Andy Warhol Diaries, p. 760.
32. See Colacello, Holy Terror, p. 642.
33. See Steinberg, “The Hands and Feet,” Leonardo’s Incessant “Last Supper,”
p. 69.
34. Ibid., p. 63.
35. See Flatley, “Warhol Gives Good Face,” p. 122.
36. Ibid., p. 105.
37. Ibid.
38. See Gavin Butt, “Dishing on the Swish, or, the ‘Inning’ of Andy Warhol,” in
Between You and Me: Queer Disclosure in the New York Art World, 1948–1963
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 106–35, and Jessica Beck,
“Beauty Problems,” in Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body, exh. cat. (Pittsburgh:
Andy Warhol Museum, 2016), pp. 9–18.
39. See Treichler, “aids, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse,” p. 31.
40. Ibid., p. 35.
41. Ibid., p. 52. See also David B. Morris, Illness and Culture in the Postmodern
Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 190.
42. Discussing the homophobic rhetoric accompanying the spread of the aids epi-
demic, Watney cites a New York Times op-ed in which William F. Buckley argues
that homosexuals should be tattooed with their test results: “everyone detected
with aids should be tatooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users,
and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.” Buckley,
“Crucial Steps in Combating the Aids Epidemic; Identify All the Carriers,” New
York Times, March 18, 1986. See Watney, “Moral Panics,” in Watney, Policing
Desire: Pornography, aids, and the Media, Media and Society series, ed. Richard
Bolton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 44.
94 95