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ANDY
WARHOL SIXTY
LAST
SUPPERS

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hirty years ago, Andy Warhol’s
Last Supper made its debut
in Milan. To mark the anniver-
sary of this project, Milan’s
Museo del Novecento is host-
ing a special presentation from
March 24 to May 18, 2017. Text by
Jessica Beck, curator at the Andy
Warhol Museum.
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 re-
turned with gusto to painting, working freehand
on a dramatic scale. Sealing his place within the
canon, he spent this period engaging contempo-
rary issues of technology and politics while also
making copies after the masters Botticelli, de Chir-
ico, 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 liter-
ature on these paintings is that it often makes lit-
tle 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 dis-
cussions of the work, with the result that the paint-
ings 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.
In 1984, the art dealer Alexander Iolas, an Egyp-
tian-born former ballet dancer and an eccentric col-
lector of Surrealist and other early modernist art,
commissioned Warhol to create a series of paint-
ings and prints based on Leonardo da Vinci’s icon-
ic Last Supper. Warhol’s final exhibition during his
lifetime, Warhol—Il Cenacolo, featured twenty-two
of these works and was staged in 1987 in the refec-
tory of Milan’s Palazzo delle Stelline, which then
housed the bank Credito Valtellinese. The venue
was selected for its proximity to Leonardo’s mas-
terwork, which was painted in 1495–98 just across
the street, in the refectory of the Dominican clois-
ter Santa Maria delle Grazie.1 While only two dozen
works were exhibited at the opening, Warhol had
spent two years, most of 1985 and 1986, producing
over 100 additional renditions of The Last Supper.
The commission, the last of the artist’s career, be-
came a near obsession for him. In prophetic fash-
ion, these images of the eve of Christ’s crucifixion
marked the end of Warhol’s own career and, in-
deed, 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.
The materials Warhol produced in relation to
The Last Supper are remarkable for their quantity
and their diversity, including works on paper,
large-scale paintings, and even sculpture. Within
the series two distinct styles emerge, one that
stayed true to Leonardo’s original by screen-print-
ing the source image on canvas, the other departing
from it by combining hand-painted images of Christ
with commercial-brand-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 stud-
ied as The Last Supper, yet the original as Leonar-
do executed it on the refectory wall has not existed
for 500 years.2 Painted with an experimental tech-
nique on dry plaster, the image began to deterio-
Previous spread:
Andy Warhol, Sixty Last
Suppers, 1986, acrylic and
silkscreen ink on linen, 116 ×
393 inches (294.6 × 998.2
cm). Photo by Rob McKeever
Collage of source material
for The Last Supper,
1986, advertisements and
headlines cut from New York
Post and collaged together
with tape. Photo by The Andy
Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh;
Contribution The Andy
Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts, Inc.
rate within a few years after its completion. Shifting
trends in conservation and decades of painstak-
ing repair have only succeeded in salvaging se-
lect 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 per-
plex and inspire art enthusiasts and scholars world-
wide. 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 reveal
of Christ’s betrayer or the celebration of the Eucha-
rist—is more clearly indexed by the dramatic ges-
tures among the disciples.3 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 dete-
riorated. Leonardo’s Last Supper is a kind of mean-
ing machine. Although Warhol’s Sixty Last Suppers
(1986) was not exhibited at the Palazzo, it is one
of his strongest assessments of this multiplicity of
meanings at work in Leonardo’s original.
Sixty Last Suppers is a modern image that os-
cillates between flatness and illusionistic depth,
ideas that lie at the heart of Renaissance painting.
This monumental work is dramatically rendered in
stark black and white. Taking as his source the Cy-
clopedia of Painters and Paintings, first published
in 1885, Warhol screen-printed that book’s facsim-
ile of an earlier engraving of The Last Supper in a
tightly structured grid sixty times across the can-
vas.⁴ In the way he looked to the source, his process
here wouldn’t have been dissimilar from that of the
scholars and enthusiasts before him: many cele-
brated writers of the Enlightenment, for example,
such as Goethe, based their study on an engraving
created in 1800 by Raphael Morghen, a copy that
left out the symbolic wine glass under Christ’s right
hand.⁵ Warhol, who worked throughout his entire
career with reproductions as source material, un-
derstood the inevitable loss or change of meaning
87
Left:
Source Material for Andy
Warhol’s Last Supper, 1980s,
printed ink on paper and
masking tape on cardboard,
11 ¾ × 15 ½ inches (29.8 ×
39.4 cm). Photo by The Andy
Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh;
Contribution The Andy
Warahol Foundation for the
Visual Arts, Inc.
Below:
Andy Warhol in front of The
Last Supper (Yellow) (1986)
at the opening of Andy Warhol
– Il Cenacolo at Palazzo delle
Stelline, Milan, January 22,
1987. Photo by Mondadori
Portfolio/Archivio Giorgio
Lotti via Getty Images

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Andy Warhol, Last Supper,
1985, Polaroid Polacolor
ER. Photo by The Andy
Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh;
Contribution The Andy
Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts, Inc.
Opposite:
Andy Warhol’s studio in New
York City with one of his
Last Supper paintings in the
background, 1987. Photo by
Evelyn Hofer/Getty Images
in the facsimile. He also understood how a repro-
duction can exist in suspended time. By the 1980s,
he had fully embraced contemporary media—tele-
vision, photography, and even the Amiga com-
puter—and had launched his own television show,
Warhol TV, which aired from 1980 to 1982. Cul-
ture as mediated experience is the appropriate lens
through which to view Sixty Last Suppers, with its
abutting black-and-white rectangles that look like
stacks of miniature television screens, the details
of Leonardo’s image faded by their shadows. These
were only the latest episodes in Warhol’s sustained
engagement with modern media, which started in
the 1960s with his Death and Disaster series: be-
fore he was referencing television, he was creating
paintings that mirrored the 16mm film strip.
In late 1962 through ’63, Warhol created some of
his most celebrated works, the Death and Disaster
paintings of suicides and car accidents copied from
periodicals such as Newsweek and Life. For a sui-
cide painting completed in 1962, 1947 White, War-
hol 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.⁶ The young
beauty landed on the roof of a limousine, where the
vehicle’s twisted metal perfectly cradled her, leav-
ing her body miraculously unmarked and her pos-
ture frozen like a sleeping beauty. Warhol printed
this image in an overlapping sequence that mirrors
the shape and structure of the film strip. The repeti-
tion and movement in works like this one heighten
and confuse the trauma of the original event—these
victims take on saintlike qualities as their suffering
becomes beautiful.
By contrast, in Sixty Last Suppers the image is
less distorted and the squares seem more aligned
with the cube of a television screen than with a strip
of 16mm film. In 1947 White, Warhol overlapped the
frames of the silkscreen and created movement by
printing the image from light to dark, a visual effect
that mirrored the flicker and motion of a film strip.
The grid in Sixty Last Suppers is clean, without blur
or overlap, and the dark shadows give the image a
soft glow echoing that of a television screen. The
repetition here is static, locking the image in time.
The moment, however, at which these images were
frozen was indeed one of public suffering for the
homosexual body. Branded in the media as the pri-
mary bearer of aids, the gay male became a sym-
bol of moral and physical decay. aids in these years
was presented both to show the authority of clinical
medicine, with its doctors working to find a cure,
and to warn of the perils of sexual deviance, the le-
sions of the sarcoma that often accompanied the
syndrome operating as visible stigmata of guilt.
The principal target of this sadistically punitive
gaze was the body of the homosexual.7
Jane Dillenberger is the author of the most thor-
ough writing on Warhol’s religious works, her ex-
tensive research tracing a trajectory from his Byz-
antine Catholic upbringing in Pittsburgh to the
Last Supper commission. Dillenberger, a theologian
as well as an art historian, must have found aids
too taboo a topic, though, since she makes no ref-
erence to the epidemic in her book.8 Warhol’s com-
mingling of commercial branding and images of
Christ in these works commented on the cultural
climate of the time in ways even the most thought-
ful commentators have overlooked.
By the early 1980s, the aids epidemic was begin-
ning to sweep through major cities in the United
States and abroad. 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 diagnos-
ing homosexual men with a rapidly fatal form of
cancer.9 Out of the forty-one patients tested, eight
died less than twenty-four months after the diag-
nosis. Panic and anxiety spread quickly within the
homosexual community and the term “gay can-
cer” was adopted to describe the disease. By May
1982 the Times had firmly connected the disease
with homosexual communities through the head-
line “New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health
Officials.”10 Headlines from 1981 onward became
more alarming as public figures and celebrities,
most famously Rock Hudson, began to die of aids.
Warhol’s first reference to “gay cancer” in his
89
THELASTSUPPERPAINTINGSARE
ACONFESSIONFORWARHOLOFTHE
CONFLICTHEFELTBETWEENHIS
FAITHANDHISSEXUALITY.
diaries came on February 6, 1982, not even a year
after the New York Times article, in reference to Joe
MacDonald, a male model whom he had photo-
graphed in the 1970s and who would die of aids in
1983. Warhol recounts,
I went to Jan Cowles’s place at 810 Fifth Ave-
nue 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.11
Just a few months later he referenced the New
York Times directly in an entry from Tuesday, 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.12
In each of the eight references to “gay cancer”
in The Andy Warhol Diaries, Warhol expresses fear

5. 90 91
Opposite:
Andy Warhol signing posters
and issues of Interview
magazine at the opening of
Andy Warhol – Il Cenacolo at
Palazzo delle Stelline, Milan,
January 22, 1987. Photo by
Leonardo Cendamo
Andy Warhol in front of
The Last Supper (Yellow)
(1986) at the opening of
Andy Warhol – Il Cenacolo at
Palazzo delle Stelline, Milan,
January 22, 1987. Photo by
Archivio Garghetti
Artwork © 2017 The Andy
Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts, Inc./Artists
Rights Society (ARS),
New York.
of contracting the disease from the most casual of
encounters and the underlying tone of his remarks
is loaded with judgment.
Warhol’s anxiety about health and illness had
started during his youth, with an early onset of
Saint Vitus’s Dance, but it peaked in the 1980s with
the growth of public paranoia over aids and the
targeting of homosexual men. The work starts to
reflect these worries as bodybuilding imagery is
juxtaposed with benevolent images of Christ, the
same Christ from the Last Supper works. Given
Warhol’s phobias over disease and illness, it is easy
to imagine the shock that he would have felt in 1984
when he found out that his boyfriend Jon Gould, his
last long-term relationship, had been admitted to
the hospital with pneumonia. By 1986, Gould had
died from aids, at the age of thirty-three.
Despite an age difference of twenty-five years,
Gould and Warhol were involved for five years,
traveling together, working together, and for a
short period living together. Warhol was infatuated
with Gould at times, writing desperately about his
feelings in his diaries and photographing him ob-
sessively. Gould is one of the most photographed
subjects of Warhol’s late career, appearing in over
300 of the 1,500 contact sheets Warhol produced
between February 1981 and September 1985.13 No
matter how much the artist tried to put it out of his
mind, he had to realize that the deadly aids virus
had been incubating in the body of the young man
whose bed he had shared. Crucial to this narra-
tive, it was within days of Gould’s death that War-
hol started painting what would turn out to be his
final series of paintings: The Last Supper.1⁴
Given the sociopolitical climate in which War-
hol was producing these paintings, and taking into
account his private relationships, it is confounding
that the link between the aids epidemic and the
Last Supper series remains tangential in the cur-
rent literature. In paintings like The Last Supper
(The Big C) (1986) Warhol both flaunts and conceals
a connection to aids. Hand-painted via a projec-
tion process, like his Campbell’s Soups of 1961–62,
this Last Supper leaves parts of the canvas unfin-
ished. The figure of Christ recurs four times, while
hands appear repeatedly. Thomas’s finger point-
ing to the sky, intimating that heaven knows he is
free of guilt, appears prominently next to the “eye”
in the Wise potato-chip logo.1⁵ Pulled from a New
York Post headline, the phrase “The Big C” is cen-
tered under Christ’s face on the lower-left portion
of the canvas. Dillenberger asserts that “The Big
C” references Warhol’s fear of cancer, a conserva-
tive account that presents only half the story. The
source material for this painting, in the archives of
The Andy Warhol Museum, 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. Warhol ulti-
mately left out the aids headline while keeping the
more covert “The Big C,” but given the direct ref-
erences 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 image of Christ, offering his flesh in the
Eucharist, was a symbol of salvation during a time
of heightened suffering, an unusually personal and
emotional image for Warhol. By 1987, the year he
debuted his Last Supper paintings, aids had be-
come an uncomfortably common occurrence in his
circle of friends and colleagues. Iolas, the galler-
ist who gave him both his first exhibition, in New
York in 1952, and his last one, Warhol—Il Cenaco-
lo, in Milan in 1987, died of aids just five months
after the opening of the later show; in January of
that year, when the show opened, Iolas was in the
advanced stages of the disease and was relegated
to a sanitarium. Warhol surely felt that the disease
was surrounding him.
More than a demonstration of reverence for
Leonardo’s masterwork, or even an unveiling of
his 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 during the mass suffering of the homo-
sexual community during the aids crisis. aids had
generated a new way to brand the bodies of homo-
sexual men as symbols of moral decay, targets for
both fear and punishment. In this perspective these
paintings can be understood as some of the most
personal and revealing works of Warhol’s career.
1 See Corinna Thierolf, “All the Catholic Things,” in Carla Schulz-
Hoffmann, ed., Andy Warhol: The Last Supper (Ostfildern-Ruit:
Cantz, 1998), p. 23.
2 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 March 18, 2017).
3 See Leo Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant “Last Supper” (New York:
Zone Books), 2001.
4 See Thierolf, All the Catholic Things, pp. 23–24.
5 See Steinberg, “The Subject,” Leonardo’s Incessant “Last Supper”,
p. 36.
6 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 March 18, 2017).
7 See Simon Watney, “The Spectacle of aids,” in AIDS: Cultural
Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 1998), p. 78.
8 In The Religious Art of Andy Warhol Jane Daggett Dillenberger
makes just one reference to aids, 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 anxiety 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.
Dillenberger, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol (New York:
Continuum, 1998), p. 71.
9 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-cancer-seen-in-41-homosexuals.html
(accessed March 18, 2017).
10 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 March 18, 2017).
11 Andy Warhol, “Saturday, February 6, 1982,” The Andy Warhol
Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (New York: Warner Books, 1989), p. 429.
12 Warhol, “Tuesday, May 11, 1982,” in ibid., p. 442.
13 “Andy Warhol @ Christies: Jon Gould,” Christies digital sales
“Eyes on the Guise,” available online at https://onlineonly.christies.
com/s/andy-warhol-christies-members-only-eyes-guise/jon-
gould-6/589 (accessed March 18, 2017).
14 Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York:
Random House, 1990), pp. 480–81.
15 See Steinberg, “The Hands and Feet,” Leonardo’s Incessant
“Last Supper”, p. 69.