St Andy Warhol: Communion Soup &Transubstantiating the Culture

"Thus, even as a rich and famous man, whenever he could, he would go to help feed the homeless at the church of Heavenly Rest on 90th Street. 'Andy would fix the coffee, serve the food, and help clean up. He was truly a friend of these friendless people. He loved these forgotten people of New York and they loved him back,' one witness recounts. Warhol did not keep these gestures of his secret. On the contrary, every so often he would try to drag one of his reluctant friends to this kitchen for the poor. And once they were inside, he did not allow any protesting, commenting, 'If we are here, it is because we wanted to be here.' Later, in his diary, he left a trace of this experience: 'It is a different world. You see people with ugly teeth. And we are used to all these people with perfect teeth.' (link)

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Below is an excerpt from an amazing article (originally from Regeneration (RIP), found on an amazing Catholic website, "Godspy." Be sure to read the whole thing.

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TRANSUBSTANTIATING THE CULTURE: ANDY WARHOL'S SECRET

More than one seemingly religious person's secret sins have been exposed at their death; Warhol's secrets were that he went to church and served at a soup kitchen.


By James Romaine

.....Do these religious revelations offer insight into Warhol's art? They do; perhaps more than has yet been appreciated by either the art or Christian worlds. Warhol's consumer imagery at first seems obsessed with the external world of contemporary culture to the exclusion of the internal life of faith. But there is also a persistent longing for something more, a hunger that is evident in the last Self-portrait and, most famously, in those cans of Campbell's soup.

In order to see this religious dimension, we must regain our sense of the sacramental—the use of material things as vehicles for encountering the divine and enabling eternity to break into time and space. Warhol's pop art, often criticized as mere regurgitation of advertising, actually displaces images from their original context in the commercial world, transporting them to the realm of art, collapsing the distance between the two, and creating new associations and meanings.

The Campbell's soup can, one of Warhol's most famous motifs, thus becomes another self-portrait of the artist. The can, like Warhol's public persona, is cool, metallic, machine-made, impenetrable, a mirror of its surroundings. These qualities, superficial though they are, nevertheless seduce the eye.

But what completes this self-portrait are the can's contents; they should be the most significant part, but actually have very little in common with the can's exterior. Soup, a warm source of nourishment, is a sensitive element that will not survive long outside of a protective container. Hidden beneath supermarket imagery, Warhol's faith is sealed for protection.

While carefully keeping himself secure inside, Warhol succeeded in making everyone believe that the soup can should be the focus of attention. Some have become enraptured by their own reflection on its metallic surface. Others have complained that Warhol and his art are hollow. Very few have attempted to open the can and find out what's inside.

Warhol's creative gift was an ability to bring subjects into spiritual equilibrium. He treated ultra-glamorous movie stars and anonymous police arrest photos with the same combination of contempt and envy. Warhol used consumer items more than just as mirrors of his time.

What seems to have attracted him to Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell's soup cans, as in 200 Campbell's Soup Cans, was a sense of comfort, belonging, and equality.

Warhol admitted that one reason he was attracted to the imagery of Campbell's soup was that he had eaten Campbell's soup nearly every day as a boy. Soup, of course, is a nearly global icon of home, but Campbell's is a distinctly American icon.

For Warhol, growing up in a poor immigrant family struggling to find its place in a new homeland, Campbell's soup probably offered a reassuring sense of belonging.

Warhol loved mass consumer imagery because of its equilibrating powers. "Coke is Coke," he once said, "and no matter how rich you are you can't get a better one than the one the homeless woman on the corner is drinking."

Living in New York City, Warhol undoubtedly experienced the way cities have of exaggerating the distance between wealth and poverty even while juxtaposing them. Perhaps reinforced by the piety and poverty of his childhood, Warhol may have looked forward to the equality of heaven, with the mechanical nature of his work forecasting an eternal destiny.

Warhol's strategy of representing heaven by repeated images has been linked to Byzantine icons, which limit individual creativity in favor of a standardized form. Warhol's work has a certain hypnotic rhythm, not unlike the rosary. This repetition also suggests that the image could extend infinitely, giving us a glimpse into eternity through everyday reality.

200 Campbell's Soup Cans celebrates more than social egalitarianism. But in a critique of America's emergent consumer religion, 200 Campbell's Soup Cans also joins a long artistic tradition of vanitas images, in which lavish displays of wealth are offset by reminders of life's fleeting nature and the inevitable final judgment.

Warhol's references to religious themes increased throughout his career, culminating in his most overtly religious and plainly sacramental works, patterned after Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. Warhol made more than one hundred works based on Leonardo's image, but until recently these works received very little attention.

Many things may have drawn Warhol to the Last Supper, including the fact that Warhol's own art often dealt with food as a symbol of heaven.

Warhol's Catholicism asserted the miracle of transubstantiation, in which food—bread and wine—becomes a heavenly substance. Warhol may have accessed Leonardo's imagery to set himself within a certain tradition of religious art.

Leonardo brought out the classical and realist artist in Warhol, even though the meaning of "classical" and "real" had radically changed in the five hundred years separating them. Leonardo's breakthroughs in artistic perspective had radically brought the Christ figure into the viewer's world; Warhol brought Leonardo down off the wall, and in so doing brought Christ and the sacrament of the Eucharist into his world.

Indeed, Warhol's interest in Campbell's soup and the Last Supper are linked. Remember, Warhol said that his attraction to Campbell's soup was that he had eaten it every day as a child. Warhol's brother recalled that a reproduction of the Last Supper hung on their family's kitchen wall. As Warhol sat eating his soup, he ate under the watchful presence of Christ..


-James Romaine

Link..read it all