Andy Warhol: Sixty Last Suppers

Andy Warhol: Sixty Last Suppers

Thirty years ago, Andy Warhol’s Last Supper made its debut in Milan. To mark the anniversary of this project, Milan’s Museo del Novecento is hosting a special presentation from March 24 to May 18, 2017.

Text by Jessica Beck, curator at the Andy Warhol Museum, featured in the summer 2017 issue of Gagosian Quarterly.

Essay Excerpt:

I’ve got these desperate feelings that nothing means anything. 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

He became more and more like a medieval alchemist searching—not so much for the philosopher’s stone as for the elixir of youth.

—John Richardson, “Eulogy for Andy Warhol,” 1987

“In the final decade of his life, Andy Warhol returned with gusto to painting, working freehand on a dramatic scale. Sealing his place within the canon, he spent this period engaging contemporary issues of technology and politics while also making copies after the masters Botticelli, de Chirico, and Raphael. But none of these subjects could compare in number to the more than 100 paintings in Warhol’s Last Supper series, produced between 1984 and 1986. The dilemma with the current literature on these paintings is that it often makes little reference, and in some cases no reference at all, to the major crisis affecting Warhol’s community at the time of their completion: the AIDS epidemic. The ambiguity in the literature on Warhol’s subject matter in the last decade of his career stems in part from the conflict between his Catholic faith and his homosexuality. This tension is often ignored in discussions of the work, with the result that the paintings appear one-dimensional. Once these issues are brought to the forefront, a broad discussion of mortality and salvation can emerge as the crux of the Last Supper paintings.”