Andy Warhol and his Lemko Ancestry

By Orysia Sopinka Chwaluk

Andy Warhol, son of Julia Zavatska and Ondrej Warhola was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928. Both his parents were from the town of Mikova, then a part of Lemikivshchyna in the Rusynske voievodstvo (district) of Galicia.  They were farmers who had learned to survive by living off the land.  America was the place of hope and opportunity for them.  However, when Ondrej arrived in Pittsburgh, he and other Lemko immigrants had to work in coalmines, and at times as despised strikebreakers, where they barely made enough money to survive. Times were tough. Julia made flowers out of tin cans and sold them to help make ends meet. She loved to make pysanky at Easter time and had a flair for drawing cats and flowers.  Andy watched his mother work and learned from her.  On Sundays, she would take her children to the Greek Catholic Church in the Ruska Dolyna, a picturesque valley in Pittsburgh where Ukrainian churches with golden domes dotted the horizon.   There she prayed for Andy’s health, her youngest child, who suffered from many diseases while he would stare in awe at the beautiful and mystical religious art around him.

Andy’s parents spoiled him because of his ill health. His mother allowed him to collect pictures and autographs of movie stars.  She bought a film projector so he could watch cartoons on the wall.  He loved going to movies and eventually learned the art of film-making. It wasn’t until his senior year in art school that his genius as an artist was noticed because he could not draw in the conventional way.  Andy had a special sense of style and design and often chose subjects that were shocking and controversial which made them easy to sell.  Seeking a career, he moved to New York City with his mother and soon became an illustrator for “Glamour” magazine.

Andy Warhol invented a new art technique called blotting by which he superimposed the same image on top of each other to give a picture a stylized look. He also worked as a commercial artist for other large companies and became well known in the advertising world.  But, it was wealthy, renowned art consumers whom Andy really wanted to associate with. Some of his ideas came from comic books such as Popeye, Superman and Dick Tracy. Images of these characters would be painted in enormous dimensions as if they were to jump out at the viewer. Pop Art and the love of consumerism married with Fine Art helped Andy find his own style. Traditional talent as an artist didn’t matter much to him because he believed that Americans were only interested in the superficial appearances. His most famous piece is the Campbell Soup can. He also painted the Coca-Cola bottle and the dollar bill, all pop art subjects and symbols of America. He displayed multiple images of them in rows, creating a pattern. After he invented silk screening, his work became easier and he could make many copies of it and sell more. Later, he learned how to silkscreen photographs and chose celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, important political figures, and teen idols so that he could associate with the rich and famous. “Gold Marilyn”, a silkscreen on acrylic gold paint, resembles a mysterious icon on the iconostas in a Greek Catholic church, reflecting Andy’s childhood Sundays in church. This work hung at the entrance of The Factory, Warhol’s studio and home, during his first one-man exhibition, and one month later hung in the Museum of Modern Art as a part of the permanent collection.  Eventually, celebrities such as Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor and Mick Jagger came from all over the world and paid a high price to get their portraits done.

Andy enjoyed experimenting with movies as well.  His fixed camera portraits are about unusual subjects, for example, a man sleeping for eight hours or a person eating a mushroom for 40 minutes. His best underground movie The Chelsea Girls, two stories going on at the same time on double screens, portrays young people involved with drugs and their psychological problems. As his popularity grew in the art world, recognition also came from the underground film world.   

Although Andy Warhol was primarily an artist, he was also the author of eight books and two television programs. Born with dyslexia, he used a tape recorder while working so that someone else could transcribe his conversations or he dictated his thoughts. His most popular books are The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, and Popism: The Warhol Sixties.  The diaries became so popular that the social elite felt slighted if they were not mentioned in them.

Andy often said that he came from nowhere. In fact, after WWI, Lemkivshchyna from where his parents emigrated, was divided up between Poland and Slovakia. After the Curzon Line was drawn, Rus-Ukraine, the ancestral homeland for all Rusyns lost its most western part. Although Andy wanted to forget his humble beginnings in Pittsburgh, they followed him to New York City.  He prayed every morning and would drop into churches to talk to God. He painted religious pictures. He looked after his mother almost until her death, a thank-you to the person who taught him how to draw and gave him the emotional support he craved.

Andy Warhol was a genius who could turn anything common, even a Brillo soap box into art. In Europe, the art world accepted him more readily than in America. The Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce, Slovakia, built in 1991 three years after his death, holds some of his famous pieces - the “Hammer and Sickle”, his flowers and a portrait of Mick Jagger. Born from poor, humble Lemko parents, Andy Warhol became a millionaire, an art innovator, an author and a film producer as well as the most influential modern artist of the 20th Century.

NP - This article is third in a series of three articles written about distinguished individuals with a Lemko heritage, in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Canadian Lemko Association. Also, 2011-2012 marks the 120^th Anniversary of Ukrainian Settlement in Canada. The previous two articles on Lemko’s are written about the first Ukrainian Canadian parliamentarian Michael Luchkovich and Supreme Court Justice John Sopinka who have made major contributions to Canadian society.

 PHOTO

Andy Warhol, pop artist