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ANDY WARHOL'S MOTHER by Elaine Rusinko

ANDY WARHOL'S MOTHER

The Woman Behind the Artist

by Elaine Rusinko

Pub Date: Nov. 12th, 2024
ISBN: 9780822948407
Publisher: Univ. of Pittsburgh

The mom behind the Pop art.

Julia Warhola’s worldview was defined by the traditional peasant culture of Miková, the village where she was born in 1891 in what is now Slovakia. Rusinko, a scholar of Carpatho-Rusyn literature whose grandparents were from the same region, is an ideal guide to this terrain. Her sources include Warhola’s surviving relatives and her son’s 610 “Time Capsule” boxes containing his mother’s clothing, prayer books, and correspondence. The author shows how Warhola’s ethnic culture and her self-mythologizing nature resonated in Warhol’s personality. As Rusinko writes, “Julia’s theatrical personality made her a skilled salesperson and a model for her artist son.” Warhol’s lifelong superstitions and mysticism were surely redolent of his mother’s old-country roots. In fact, Rusinko makes a convincing case that Warhola’s folk-art aesthetic—cottage painting, embroidery, pysanky (painted eggs)—informed her son’s artistic vision. His famous series of soup cans and flowers mimic the visual representation of Eastern Catholic icons. His Skulls series echoes his mother’s memory of the skulls of World War I soldiers scattered in the forest. Warhola’s full life is recounted here, including her marriage to Andrii Varchola in 1909, her immigration to industrial Pittsburg in 1921, and her life cohabitating in her son’s Upper East Side townhouse in Manhattan for nearly two decades. But the book’s consideration of Warhola as a true folk artist with roots in Carpatho-Rusyn culture is its greatest contribution. Extensive illustrations include her childlike and charming drawings from the book Holy Cats by Andy Warhol’s Mother and examples of her idiosyncratic calligraphy, which became a “signature” of Warhol’s early commercial work. Her artistic output, it turns out, was significant.

A persuasive look at a famous artist’s maternal muse.