Warhol, in a Different Light

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Andy Warhol needs no introduction, but I’ll give him one anyway: pop artist, provocateur, fame-obsessed mirror to America’s consumer culture and also, surprisingly, a practicing Catholic who painted cats and once said he wanted to be a tap dancer.

Most of us know Warhol for the soup cans and Marilyns, the wigs and the Factory, and the now-inescapable phrase, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” But there’s a softer, quieter Warhol hiding in plain sight, and one of his more meditative works lives right here, at our own Jonathan Beach Club.

You may have passed by it without much fanfare: a screenprint from Warhol’s Sunset series, glowing in its gradient hues like the last exhale of a summer day. Unlike his brash celebrity portraits, Sunset is hushed. It’s repetition without noise. Color without chaos. And it was never meant for a gallery or auction block. It was actually commissioned in 1969 for a chapel.

Yes, a chapel.

The piece was created at the request of Dominique and John de Menil (founders of the Menil Collection in Houston and major patrons of sacred art) for a meditation room in the now-legendary Rothko Chapel. They wanted work that spoke to spiritual reflection. Warhol responded with a single image of the sun sinking into the sea, altered hundreds of times in subtly shifting tones. Each screenprint in the Sunset series is unique. Ours is one of at least 100 known variations.

And just like that, the king of Pop Art gave us a work about impermanence. It’s easy to forget that Warhol, despite the parties and polaroids and penchant for surface, was also deeply contemplative. He attended church regularly, carried a rosary in his pocket, and spent hours volunteering at shelters. He created a silent film of a man sleeping for five hours (Sleep, 1963), painted many different versions of The Last Supper, and left behind 610 cardboard “Time Capsules” filled with everything from old newspapers to unopened cookies.

But long before all that, Warhol was just Andy Warhola, born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, the youngest son of Slovakian immigrants. His father was a construction worker. His mother, Julia, was an artist in her own right: she made intricate paper cutouts and wrote whimsical scripts in elaborate cursive. Andy spent much of his childhood sick in bed with Sydenham’s chorea, a neurological condition that caused uncontrollable movements. While other kids played outside, he stayed home, mostly bedridden, and drew. He colored, traced, and devoured movie magazines, forming an early obsession with celebrity and image.

He studied commercial art at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), and moved to New York in 1949, where he became a wildly successful illustrator for high-end magazines like Glamour and Harper’s Bazaar. His shoe ads were works of art, they even won awards, but he wanted more. He wanted to blur the line between art and advertising, between fame and meaning.

He did exactly that - turning soup cans, Brillo boxes, and celebrities into icons of modern life. And while his silkscreens screamed mass production, Warhol himself was anything but replicable.

There’s something poetic about the fact that today, even in death, he remains visible - eternally on display. His grave in Pittsburgh has a 24/7 livestream called Figment. You can visit it online any time, day or night, and watch people leave flowers, soup cans, and even the occasional glittery wig. (Yes, really. See for yourself.)

As we look ahead to our upcoming Sunset Soirée, The Jonathan Art Foundation presents “Meet the Artist: Andy Warhol” on July 24th at the Beach Club, I hope you’ll join us in celebrating this quieter side of Warhol. The part that invites reflection instead of reaction. Not just the pop prophet of fame and surface, but also a philosophical trickster, a spiritual minimalist, and maybe even a little bit of a ghost in the soup can. Come for the view, stay for the art, and maybe let Andy remind you that even the most ordinary moments, like watching the sun go down, can be extraordinary when we actually stop to notice them.

Sunset, Andy Warhol, 1972, Ed 306/470 screen print on wove paper