'The Last Supper': Andy Warhol's morbid final work (2024)

The art writers could ponder on Andy Warhol through millions of words and never pin him down. For decades now, people have been trying, attempting to consider the meaning or lack there of in his work, or figure out who he was or what he stood for. As a famously elusive figure who created a carefully curated public character, his identity was part of his art and, in that way, was just as complex and confusing.

On the surface, he was as shiny and new and popular as his co*ke bottles or soup cans, but when it comes to his darker works like his final, domineering ‘The Last Supper’, it’s clear that there was always something under the surface.

In his words, Warhol seemed to like to pretend to be nonchalant and unphased about death. He quipped, “Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you because someone’s got to take care of all your details.” His ‘Death And Disaster’ series, made between 1962 and 1967 up of over 70 artworks on the topics of mortality and violence, could be read as a kind of disconnected take on the topic. In galleries, you walk past the bright colour print screens of electric chairs or sensationalised headlines declaring deaths, and then you move on. He handles the topic much like he handles his portraits of celebrities or the poppiest of pop art, as if death is merely another media fascination without anything more to it.

But really, it feels like beneath the surface, Warhol’s entire career was motivated by a life-long fear of death. As a child of working-class Austro-Hungarian immigrants, young Andrew Warhola was forced to face up to mortality time and time again, as per tradition. When his father passed, the body lay at rest in their home for three days, during which time Warhol apparently hid in his bedroom, refusing to come out due to total, paralysing fear of his father’s corpse. When he then got ill with scarlet fever as a child, it became clear that this manifested into a tightly gripped terror towards the idea of the end.

“I never understood why when you died, you didn’t just vanish; everything could just keep going on the way it was, only you just wouldn’t be there,” he said once. “I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say ‘figment’.” That seems to be the key. Not only does the entirety of pop art deal with the idea of making permanent the fleeting nature of fame or celebrity or even disposable household objects, but Warhol’s signature method of print screening, so images could be repeated forever, was a clear move to make himself immortal.

When it came to Warhol’s first brush with death, this trauma response kicked up a gear. In 1968, the artist was shot but survived. In the aftermath, he decided he didn’t want to be a puny, mortal artist; he wanted to be a business. “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art,” he said, as he shut down The Factory as a social gathering and instead launched into what he called ‘Business Art’. He’d put his name on anything, he made loads of everything, he turned himself into a corporation rather than a fleeting, living thing.

From the end of the 1960s through to the end 1970s, Warhol was a machine. He was everywhere, making portraits of everyone and anyone who paid enough, designing Interview Magazine, appearing on TV, and mass-producing work exactly as a business does. But then when you compare all that to his final work, there’s a rift.

Warhol’s final ever project was ‘The Last Supper’, a series of paintings based on the famed Da Vinci image. Sure, he did it in typical Warholian style as he made various versions and copies with different colours and designs. But there is something striking and stark about the clear religious image and his unfaltering view of it.

His first brush with death had sent him running in the opposite direction, doing anything to avoid death. His final years, amidst the worst of the AIDS crisis as the gay community was dying en masse, forced him to face mortality once again and just as helplessly and scared as he was as a child. But this time, he didn’t run. He instead painted the image of Jesus preparing for his own death, proving to be strangely prophetic. Warhol’s last painting and his gallery displays of it would be his own last hurrah.

Some read the painting as Warhol reverting to his younger self. As his fear of death surrounded him again, he seemed to turn back into that child with the corpse downstairs. Perhaps as a way to handle that, he also returned to the religion he’d been raised in, attempting to reconnect with his catholic roots. Or, perhaps, there was something in Warhol that knew he was in his final days. Clearly witnessing the mass death surrounding him and writing in his diary about the start of an illness that would turn out to be the gallbladder issues that he’d soon die in surgery for, there’s a premonition in the painting. At once, the fear of his younger self and the resignation of his future death seemed to meet, processing them both through these looming catholic panels.

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