The Religious Art of Andy Warhol.

Morgan, David

The Religious Art of Andy Warhol. By Jane Daggett Dillenberger. New York: Continuum, 1998. 128 pp. $39.95 cloth.

For many people today, artists are heroes. In the history of the United States, the glorification of the artist among Protestants began in the middle of the nineteenth century when Episcopalian, Congregationalist, Unitarian, and other clergy toured the museums of Europe and wrote breathless letters and memoirs about the transcendent moments and epiphanies that gripped them as they stood before the works of Raphael, Michelangelo, and the titans of Renaissance art. Protestants have long adored gazing on the spectacle of Catholic imagery. But it is about more than the tourist's curiosity about the exotic papist. In search of the intense physiology of religious faith that such Calvinists as Jonathan Edwards and others before him had understood as the affections of genuine belief, American Protestants such as Horace Bushnell and Henry Ward Beecher were transfixed and deeply touched by the sacred art they saw in Florence and Rome. Jane Daggett Dillenberger writes and thinks similarly. Artists are prophets and seers, visionaries with special gifts. They contemplate the sublime mysteries of human existence and their works are the produce of genius and mystery and the shaman's esoteric rites. This is a Romantic view of art and artists, and it is certainly a beguiling one. It takes feeling seriously and finds in aesthetic experience a number of analogues to religious life. But this approach to studying the career and work of an artist is also liable to hagiography and to artificial villainy, the invention of evildoers whom the hero battles--and inevitably defeats, at least if it is an American story.

Dillenberger's short book is a paean to Andy Warhol. Not that he does not deserve her praise. Warhol will likely remain one of the most important artists of twentieth-century American art as well as one of its most popularly recognized. The artist's keen graphic sense, exercised in his early practice as a designer, expressed itself in images with all the memorability and visual currency of a major commercial trademark. Warhol created magnificently colored paintings and prints that have entered the imagination and visual culture of modern life in North America as well as many other places around the world. Dillenberger's knowledgeable selection of works by Warhol in her beautifully produced book offers clear evidence of the artist's stature. But the accompanying hagiography is sometimes defiant of even the most rudimentary logic. For instance, noting the artist's many depictions of food in the early 1960s--the man of ten thousand Campbell's soup cans--Dillenberger befuddles the reader with this comment: "the many items of food that Warhol painted with iconic directness preceded the general national concern for the hungry and the homeless" (29). The notion that Warhol painted and printed hundreds, even thousands of soup cans forty years ago in order to comment prophetically on hunger as it came to be recognized in the 1970s and 1980s is as impossible to substantiate as claiming that his famous wigs were an anticipation of the "general national concern" about hair loss. Only a prophet could do such a thing. This is also the artist who in 1976 produced a series of paintings of skulls which, the author tells us, was "related to anxiety over the spread of AIDS" (71). Considering that the disease was not discovered and described until 1981, this is prophetic indeed.

In addition to the vague thinking about artistic valor and soothsaying, this account of the heroic modern artist relies on vilifying popular culture as a vulgarizing, distorting, simplistic assault on fine art and genuine religious sentiment. In Dillenberger's account, Warhol is a priest of high art who redeems art fallen into the hands of commercial mass culture. She seems intent on inscribing Warhol in the canon established by Clement Greenberg in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1939 Greenberg wrote a seminal essay ("Avant Garde and Kitsch") in which he set out the central articles of faith for American taste in vanguard art. According to Greenberg, art was ordained to struggle against the mind-numbing vulgarities of modern mass culture and its arsenal of kitsch, a term Dillenberger takes up in her valorization of Warhol. Referring to the large price tag, the "crassly commerical symbol," in an image of Raphael's "Sistine Madonna," Dillenberger writes: "It is the commercial marketing world that has reproduced these two religious masterpieces [Raphael's `Madonna' and Leonardo's `Last Supper'] in cheapened and distorted copies, making them ubiquitous and finally boring. Is Warhol's price tag a jolting reminder of this?" (56)

Later, Dillenberger asserts that Warhol "repristinated Leonardo's mural, recreating it and making it accessible to twentieth-century sensibilities" (99). One wonders "whose" twentieth-century sensibilities? Apparently not the millions of twentieth-century Christians who display a "degraded copy" of Leonardo's painting in their homes (80). Presumably these folks just have bad taste. But it is possible to think about this differently. Dwelling on the failure of commercial mass culture to honor the pristine glories of fine art hinders understanding that, for people of faith, "cheapened and distorted copies" are the stuff of living devotion and domestic piety.

The argument of this book is that since Warhol was a closet Christian, someone who, despite his public lifestyle, was privately drawn late in life to the church of his childhood (though his participation was restricted to sitting in the back of the church and watching), his late paintings of religious subjects are infused with an authentic religious sense. Though much of the book passes without convincing the reader, by the end Dillenberger has made the case, at least in the context of several particular images. It is certainly worth thinking very carefully about the significance of a number of fascinating images by Warhol as instances in which he visually conveys the ambivalence and voyeurism that conflict with the longing he experienced for religious belief and community.

David Morgan Valparaiso University