In Memorium: Andy Warhol (1928-1997)

Andy Warhol (1928-1987)

In the 1960s, Andy Warhol gained virtually instant fame as one of America's most innovative artists.  Although he came to be a most public figure, his natural shyness served to obscure the fact that he was of Carpatho-Rusyn background.  Most of his work was done in New York City, but he never left his Pittsburgh roots or his Carpatho-Rusyn heritage far behind.  His unique sensibility was shaped by Pittsburgh influences, including ethnocultural ties, religious life, Byzantine iconography, art classes at Schenley High School, Hornes department store display windows, and the artist and teacher Robert Lepper at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University).

As an internationally recognized painter, photographic craftsman, film maker, and pop art celebrity, Warhol appeared reluctant to discuss his origins.  Once when asked about his background, he replied, "Why don't you make it up?"  In dealing with the media, he liked to be mysterious, provocative, and even something of a riddle.  Perhaps this is why a number of contradictory statements from reputable reference books and newspapers have appeared.

The facts of Andy Warhol's background were revealed through discussions between the Warhola family and Dr. Paul R. Magocsi who wrote: "Andy Warhol was born as Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928.  Both his parents came from Miková, a tiny Carpatho-Rusyn mountain village just west of Medzilaborce in the Prešov Region of northeastern Slovakia." (Carpatho-Rusyn American, Vol. III, No. 2, 1980, p. 3)

Family ties were important, because brothers John, Paul and Andy had lived through some hard times.  Their family was always close to the church.  John Warhola commented on Andy: "When Andy was a boy, we thought he was going to be a priest.  Even under pressure, he never swore.  He believed in working hard." Paul and John Warhola vacationed with Andy nearly every year in New York City, where Andy attended church and was a supporting member of St. Mary's Byzantine Catholic parish on East 15th Street in Manhattan.  Among his New York staff it is common knowledge that at 1 p.m., for 15 minutes everyday, he stopped to pray at a nearby Roman Catholic Church, St. Vincent Ferrer.  Finally, we recall that in 1968, when Andy was shot, he called upon a Byzantine Catholic priest from Manhattan for annointing and the last rites.

After Andy Warhol died in a New York hospital on February 22, 1987, the older brothers, John and Paul Warhola, came to take his body home to Pittsburgh.

From listening to the family, one can easily gather that the Warhola clan would hope that Andy Warhol is rememebred as a creative sensibility whose art made a social commentary which was provocative and artistic enough to justify its existence.  They hope that his work will endure as a continuing influence.

As for being accused of indulgence in self flattery and being an elitist, Warhol had a sense of humor about the artist's image.  He gave an insight into his thinking when he said in a 1979 interview, "You can do anything you want, anytime."

A number of writers about contemporary art have used the fascinating expression "pop icon" to describe much of Warhol's art.  Perhaps Warhol's religious and ethnocultural roots can help to explain some of the energy behind the leap from Warhol's early commercial art to his pop iconography.  His idealization and interpretation of secular images from show biz selections, comic strips, ad pages, and television were prefigured in an ancient yet classic style of Eastern Christian art emanating from the Byzantine era.

Warhol was raised in a religious Carpatho-Rusyn family that practices Byzantine Rite Catholicism.  In his formative years from 1928 to 1949, he was exposed to the many icons which were so common in Rusyn-American homes, prayer-books and churches: icons depicting a matter-of-fact yet other worldly presence in just two dimensions de-emphasizing the flesh and pointing to the dominance of the spirit.  These were the images of Andy's youth.

On Thursday, February 26, 1987, Andy Warhol received a traditional Byzantine Catholic funeral service with a liturgy that hails back to the Christian centers of Byzantium.  The service was in English, but some Church Slavonic was also sung.  Internment was at St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Castle Shannon, a suburb of Pittsburgh.  Andy was buried next to his parents.  There, at the gravesite, his associates from New York mourned together with family and friends over the passing of a great man whose personality, talent, energy and passion for work had inspired them.  The burial ended with the chanted prayer:
This grave is being sealed until the second coming of Christ, in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.  Grant eternal memory, O Lord, and give him blessed repose.  Vičnaja pamjať, blažennyj pokoj, vičnaja jemu pamjať, Andreju.

Jerry Jumba

MLA Citation: Jumba, Jerry. "In Memorium: Andy Warhol (1928-1987)." Carpatho-Rusyn American X, no. 1 (1987): 4

The Warhol Story in Czechoslovakia

It is a paradox that here in Czechoslovakia we have begun to discover Andy Warhol, an artist with an international reputation, only after his death on February 22, 1987.  Nearly twenty years before, he had told a visiting relative from Czechoslovakia that he would make a trip to the homeland, but that was not to be.  Andy's ancestral homeland is the mountainous Rusyn lands of northeast Slovakia, the magnificent Carpathian region where to this day people speak his native language, Rusyn.  Surely his personal world was as mysterious as the solitary mountains, and only now after his death has he at last come home by means of his creative legacy and a few unique personal items.

Andy's brother, John Warhola, came to visit the homeland of his parents for the first time in September 1987.  He travelled to Miková, a village near Medzilaborce which was the birthplace of his parents.  On that occasion, Dr. Michal Bycko invited Warhola to a private viewing of an exhibition of paintings by a local artist, Zuzana Hapáková-Osavčuková, which he had organized in Medzilaborce.  In the course of their conversations, Bycko and Warhola discussed the possibility of the acquisition of some of Andy's works, at least two originals.  At the time, Warhola suggested that there ought to be a gallery near Miková bearing the name of Andy Warhol, and he promised his cooperation to achieve such a venture.  He was subsequently quoted in the newspaper Nove žyttja (October 16, 1987) as saying: "We would like to bequeath several artistic works of Andy Warhol to the Museum of Ukrainian Culture in Svidník in order that a gallery be organized there which would carry his name."  Warhola had already become the vice-president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York.  But in those difficult days of Communist rule, neither the Svidník museum nor other institutions which Bycko contacted had any interest in what they described as the "bourgeois pseudo-artist Warhol and that dull pop art."  Bycko tried in vain to find officials who might grasp the significance of this unique possibility.  Although he found no understanding among the Communist functionaries, he did not give up.

Bycko next initiated correspondence and telephone contact with the Andy Warhol Foundation and its vice-president, John Warhola.  He wrote several articles about Andy Warhol for the Czech and Slovak press, and he distributed a great deal of informational material in order to support the founding of a gallery.  Since there was no building to house a gallery and no one to whom to give the two promised paintings, he began working for the establishment of a new gallery in Medzilaborce, which is about 13 kilometers from the Warhola homestead in Miková.  This was a difficult and time-consuming task.

In 1988, a construction company in Prešov was hired to renovate the old post office building in Medzilaborce as the Andy Warhol Gallery under the guidance of architect Václav Kolmajer.  (See "Czechoslovakia Discovers Andy," Carpatho-Rusyn American, Vol. XII, No. 3, Fall 1989, pp. 4-7).  But this first plan failed.  Nor did the name take hold, because the word "gallery" connotes a less than permanent institution.  Thus, Bycko and others continued to talk and write about founding a genuine museum, and this project enjoyed the support of the new government that came to power in Czechoslovakia after the Revolution of November 1989.

In order to promote the idea of a museum, Dr. Bycko proposed to the residents of Medzilaborce that an Andy Warhol Society (Spoločnosť Andy Warhola) be established.  This, in fact, occurred on March 2, 1990.  Vladislav Grešlík, an art historian and instructor in the Department of Creative Arts at the Faculty of Pedagogy in Prešov, became the society's president.  The very next month, the Ministry of Finance allotted funds to finance the renovation of the old post office building in Medzilaborce as the Andy Warhol Museum according to revised plans by the architect Štefan Pacák.  The project received the substantial sum of 10 million crowns for this purpose.

In April 1990, at the invitation of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center and with the financial participation of the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic, a three-man delegation travelled to New York City and Pittsburgh.  Their visit was organized and subsidized largely by the Byzantine Catholic Church hierarchy and the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center.  The delegation included a Medzilaborce town official, Dr. Michal Turok-Heteš; a Warhola family member, Vladimír Protivňak; and a representative of the Rusyn Renaissance Soceity, Dr. Ivan Bicko.  (See the Carpatho-Rusyn American, Vol. XIII, No. 1, Spring 1990, p. 11).  Not included in the delegation was Dr. Michal Bycko, who was the driving force behind the museum idea.  The group did meet with the Andy Warhol Foundation, but as New York's Village Voice reported, the delegation came without concrete plans or any notion of how the museum should be organized and financed.  The foundation itself was patient and understanding, but not much was accomplished.  Meanwhile, several other cities in Czechoslovakia began to compete for the Warhol museum, among them Svidník, Humenné, Košice, Martin, Bratislava and Prague.

Meanwhile, activists in Medzilaborce were not about to give up on the idea that they had initiated, and led by Dr. Michal Bycko they established in 1990 the Andy Warhol Museum Society.  They planned to complete the museum by August 6 (the artist's birthday), but instead of a grand opening there appeared a published announcement that the Andy Warhol Museum would not be established because an institution with that same name had already been founded in Pittsburgh.  Bycko instead proposed a new name, "Art Studio of the Andy Warhol Society," and sent to the president of the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York, Archibald Gillies, an eight-point project with the following goals:

1. to organize an annual international art exhibit (Biennale);
2. to provide young artists with scholarships to work in studios;
3. to organize symposia on modern art and on the life of Andy Warhol and other pop artists;
4. to set up an experimental video studio for the work of young film makers;
5. to establish a school for the creative arts;
6. to organize a permanent exhibit of the Ukrainian avant-garde painter and sculptor from Galicia who worked in Prague, Ivan Kulec';
7. to foster the exchange of art exhibits; and
8. to set up an art center employing at least five people.

In the spring of 1990, at a meeting of Medzilaborce's Andy Warhol Society, the head of the ATYPIK construction firm in Košice, Ján Oleksinčin, promised that the reconstruction work for the museum would be finished by September 1.  At the same time, the residents of Miková had their own plans.  On September 12, 1990, the Miková village council wrote to Minister of Culture Snopko and proposed that the Warhola family house be reconstructed and for this purpose requested 19 million crowns.  The author of the project was to be architect Sergej Choma.  Then, as now, opinions remain mixed as to whether or not this project should be realized.

Also in September 1990, John Warhola again visited Medzilaborce and Miková, this time with his son Mark.  Both attended the grand opening of an exhibit of Warhol originals at the Wallenstein Palace in Prague.  Warhola was sent by the New York foundation to look for a building appropriate for the museum.  He also reported that the foundation did not want the proposed museum to carry the name of Andy Warhol, because such a museum already existed in Andy's home town in the United States.  After considering several alternatives, the Medzilaborce activists decided on a new name: the Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce with an Exhibition by the Andy Warhol Family.  Medzilaborce citizens also wanted the street on which the museum was to be built renamed "Andy Warhol Street."  A new competion date was set for February 22, 1991, the anniversary of Warhol's death.

John Warhola took back to the United States the plans given him by Dr. Bycko and the Andy Warhol Society for the new museum.  They also included the following elements:

1. a permanent exhibition on the family of Andy Warhol;
2. a rotating display of avant-garde art by local artists;
3. an art school for children aged 7 to 15 years, with permanent teachers working in cooperation with creative artists from across Czechoslovakia;
4. a publishing house for promotional materials and other publications; and
5. a video studio and museum shop.

After returning home, Warhola telephoned to inform the Andy Warhol Society that the New York Foundation agreed with the plan and was willing to finance the art school for five or more years. In addition, the foundation would give the museum up to ten paintings.  All of this was offered on the condition that the building be completed by June 1991.

At the end of November 1991, however, work on the building was halted because of construction difficulties.  In such circumstances, the society and its vice-president, Dr. Bycko, feared that the conditions regarding the completion date would not be met.

The situation of the "Warhol Museum" also disturbed artists.  The Prague painter, Michal Cihlář, together with the photographer Rudo Prekop said that the fate of the museum hung on a thread.  The situation had become critical, especially since the Andy Warhol Foundation, which had originally offered two paintings for free, now spoke of making available fifteen originals (which would be exchanged for new ones approximately every five years) and about providing funds for various stipends and museum operational expenses.  Cihlář and Prekop complained about the construction problems and bemoaned the lax approach of the Medzilaborce town authorities.

On January 21, 1991, in a televised discussion following a documentary on Andy Warhol, Dr. Michal Turok-Heteš, director of the Medzilaborce cultural center and Andrej Čerevka, the town official responsible for the construction, tried to convince viewers they were doing all they could in order to meet the June construction deadline.  The following day, Dr. Bycko received a letter in which the New York foundation announced that in March or April it would send an architect to inspect the exhibition space.  However, it was now clear that the construction firm, ATYPIK from Košice, would be unable to complete the reconstruction of the old post office even with the sufficient finances and substantial amount of time it had been allotted.

Then, on February 14, news of an alternative decision was announced.  The Museum of Modern Art would be housed in the newly-built Cultural Center in Medzilaborce.  Three days later, the architects Kríž and Pacák met with the Andy Warhol Society, proposed designing the plaza in front of the Cultural Center in an "Andy Warhol style," and announced June 6 as the completion date for the whole project.  In early March, Dr. Bycko announced the changes to the public, stating in the press that it was the decision of the Medzilaborce city council to offer the Cultural Center for the use of the museum.  With this new plan, the Andy Warhol Society wrote the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York, asking that an architect be sent to determine what preparations needed to be made to house the Warhol originals.

In the meantime, on March 23, the Cultural Center in Medzilaborce opened its doors for the first time to host representatives from five countries (Czechoslovakia, the USSR, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the United States) at the First World Congress of Rusyns.  At that gathering, Henrieta Blumenfeldová, manager of the Andy Warhol Society, proposed a bold and magnificent plan for broadening the activity of the Medzilaborce museum.  To realize her plan, fifty million crowns would be necessary from the Slovak or Czechoslovak federal government, or from private sponsors.  The plan included construction of a new hotel in Medzilaborce; a house of culture with a movie theatre, casino, nightclub, Rusyn restaurant, and sauna; access to hunting reserves in the nearby countryside; a golf course; a baseball team from Medzilaborce; the creation of an incorporated company; and connections with travel agents to organize excursions from the United States.

In late March, the foundation sent to Medzilaborce Helena Fierlinger, an American of Czech origin and a member of Charter 77, in order to check on the state of preparations for the museum.  She was impressed with the new Cultural Center, built with extensive funding from teh former Communist regime in what became known as the style of "socialist megalomania."  The Medzilaborce authorities again promised they would do everything necessary, and she said that if all went well the Andy Warhol Foundation would give to the museum ten Warhol paintings.  During her visit Fierlinger also went to Miková where she saw the eighteenth-century church in which Andy's parents, Andrej Varchola and Júlia Závacká, were married in 1909, and which some Americans had promised to help renovate with a monetary donation.

It was also at this time that Slovakia's Minister of Culture, Ladislav Snopko, noted that the Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce did not fall under the jurisdiction of his ministry, but that it was the responsibility of the town of Medzilaborce and possibly the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York.  Before it could become the responsibility of the Ministry of Culture, there would need to be a new legislative agreement between the ministry and the foundation, and that this would probably entail a long and complicated process.  In the view of the ministry, the Medzilaborce citizens had taken on a project which they were incapable of completing.  The ministry's proposal was that there simply be a memorial plaque or monument in the village of Miková; that in Medzilaborce there be a museum containing perhaps some Warhol memorabilia; and that farther south in the large city of Košice there might be an Andy Warhol Gallery which would be dedicated, in particular, to avant-garde art.

Despite the various proposals and counterproposals, at last on Sunday, June 30, 1991, the long-awaited opening of the Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce took place.  It featured an exposition about the Andy Warhol family.  At this important event, minister Snopko stated in a television broadcast that it was his hope that by the end of the year the museum would come under the care of the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic.  The guest of honor was Andy's oldest brother, Paul Warhola, whose own paintings were widely displayed as part of the new museum's permanent collection.  Also present was Dr. Paul R. Magocsi, president of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center in New Jersey.  In an opening speech, Magocsi said that it was not by chance that the new museum was in Medzilaborce, because to this day the town is inhabited by Rusyns and Andy Warhol's background is Rusyn.  The date June 30 was also not an accident, since it was chosen to coincide with the 29th annual Rusyn Festival of Culture and Sports in Medzilaborce in which many local and foreign ensembles participated.

Now that a Museum actually existed, it was easier for the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York to make available the long-awaited Andy Warhol originals.  With the foundation's vice-president, John Warhola, acting as an intermediary, a grand opening was set for October 5, 1991.  Nearly 2,000 visitors from across Czechoslovakia and from abroad attended.  These included artists, dramatists, and 300 journalists.  Many came to Medzilaborce on a special fourteen-car Warhol Tour train from Prague, including Andy's brother John Warhola and Paul's son, the graphic artist John Warhola.  The event received wide press coverage and was broadcast on Czechoslovak national television.  Warhol posters and other memorabilia were offered for sale, and a lively cultural program created by artists, actors, and musicians was presented.  Rusyn folk ensembles sang and danced their way around the large round kiosks in front of the museum which were decorated like Warhol's Campbell Soup can.s.  Actors dressed and coiffed in the style of Andy ciruclated through the crowd, while several avant-garde, rock, and punk bands performed late into the night, creating an atmosphere that led one observer to note: "This is the biggest shock to Medzilaborce since World War II!"

The Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce is now an established entity.  All year (except Mondays) visitors can see originals and reproductions of the works of Andy Warhol, Paul Warhola, and unique personal items, documents, and photographs of the Warhola family.  Exhibits of other avant-garde and Pop artists from Czechoslovakia and abroad are also on display.

Thanks to the enormous effort of those affiliated with the Andy Warhol Society, much has been accomplished in a short time.  Most deserving of praise is Dr. Michal Bycko, without whose efforts the museum and related activity surrounding Warhol would be impossible.  The preparation and design of the museum's interior and exterior was carried out gratis by Michal Cihlář and Rudo Prekop. The museum also contains an exhibit of works by both Cihlář and Prekop which relate to Warhol - Cihlář his graphics and Prekop his photographs.  They also created unique posters for all the exhibits in the museum.  Helping further to prepare the interior and surrounding grounds were numerous enthusiastic volunteers and students from Medzilaborce high schools.

And thus has returned the son of simple, poor Rusyn peasants,
Who went into the world to swim in bigger waters, to look for work, to secure a crust of bread
And to find a better life.
Their son, who rose to international fame
And who made his mark in the world,
Became a glorious and renown artist in many spheres of art.
And as a millionare, he became a glowing example of the fulfillment of the American Dream.

Andy Warhol will live on by means of the spiritual and material wealth which he has left not only in America and in the world at large, but laso to us in the homeland of his parents - the Rusyn-inhabited region of Czechoslovakia.

Jozef Keselica

Svidník, Slovakia

MLA Citation: Keselica, Jozef. "The Warhol Story in Czechoslovakia." Carpatho-Rusyn American XIV, no. 4 (1991): 8-10.