Julia Warhola Was an Artist in Her Own Right

Julia Warhola Was an Artist in Her Own Right

Duane Michals, “Untitled (Andy Warhol and Mother)” (1958), gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches (20.3 x 25.4 cm) (photo by Duane Michals, courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York)

A little more than a mile south of Northside Scrap Metals, a family-owned business that recycles “Copper, Brass, Aluminum, Cans, Wire or any junk metal,” is the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, dedicated to one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century. Owner George Warhola took over operation of the salvage operation in 1986 from his father Paul, who was Andy’s brother. “I am from nowhere,” Warhol would say when asked about his origins, the ethnic “a” at the end of his Ruthenian name dropped when he moved to New York in 1949 to work in advertising. Yet he was very much from somewhere, and if he was ambivalent about Pittsburgh while alive, the city has adopted and celebrated him as a favorite son in death. Ultimately, Warhol was a product of working-class, industrial, immigrant Pittsburgh, as Northside Scrap Metals should indicate. Like his nephew — who in interviews fondly recalls visiting his uncle in Manhattan — Warhol collected scrap and repurposed it. The various studios where he produced his work, from East 47th to East 33rd, were always called “The Factory,” after all. 

Warhol took Pittsburgh with him, then, quite literally as concerns his mother Julia, a pious Byzantine Rite Catholic and widowed wife of a coal miner biographized in scholar Elaine Rusinko’s Andy Warhol’s Mother: The Woman Behind the Artist (2024). Julia Warhola, the diminutive, black-clad woman born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire who mostly spoke Rusyn, was a recognizable working-class Pittsburgher common in the mid-20th century, the stalwart immigrant mother supporting her husband and children. And when her son Andy moved to New York City, she went with him.

That Julia lived with Andy for two decades in a scene that included Candy Darling and Lou Reed, Edie Sedgewick and Ultra Violet, can’t be so easily dismissed. Rusinko describes “the inborn artistic sense that flowed from her Carpatho-Rusyn cultural background and illuminated her life in the mountains of Eastern Europe, the slums of Pittsburgh, and the tumult of New York City.” As associate professor emerita of Russian language and literature at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Rusinko provides a necessary corrective to a generation of biographers who “have been, at best, bemused by Warhol’s mother, and at worst, derisive.” The first scholar with a deep knowledge of Carpatho-Rusyn culture to write about Warhol, Rusinko’s engaging book will no doubt prove to be the definitive study of Julia’s profound influence on her son. 

julia warhola with baby andy warhol

Julia Warhola with Andy Warhol (right) and his brother, John (left) around 1929–32 (image via Wikimedia Commons)

Rusinko explains how Warhol emerged from a “potentially harrowing life” in which eastern European immigrants were derided as “mill hunkies” and men like his father would die in industrial accidents, but that his emergence in a glamorous world of “fame and unimaginable fortune” was in large part due to his mother, who “defied the limits imposed upon her by poverty, hardship, and illness.” Without Julia’s emotional support, it’s difficult to imagine what would have become of her eccentric and queer son growing up on the tough streets of South Oakland. Because of Julia’s work cleaning houses, Warhol was able to take childhood art classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art and attend the College of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University.

But support wasn’t all that she gave her son — Julia Warhola also supplied artistic inspiration. As Rusinko makes clear, Julia was a woman of indefatigable talent and creativity. A calligrapher, embroiderer, and illustrator, Julia created avant-garde, ready-made sculptures out of that most Warholian of wares: the tin can. Having traded in the ethnic icons of Saint John Chrysostom Church in Pittsburgh’s Four Mile Run neighborhood for the Anglophilic Gothicism of the Upper East Side’s Saint Vincent Ferrer, where Julia attended daily Mass with her son (both crossing themselves in the Byzantine manner), the artist’s mother brought her own sensibility to New York.

Appearing in her son’s experimental films, notably 1966’s Mrs. Warhol, is part of what has led art critics like Gilda Williams to describe Julia Warhola as the artist’s “oddball, foreign mother,” dismissed as a “woman who never adapted to the American way of life.” Rusinko eschews such misperceptions, interpreting Andy’s mother instead as a collaborator; she writes that “influence [was] subconsciously transmitted from Julia to Andy … apparent in his temperament and worldview, a down-to-earth practicality and superstitious mysticism.”

Recentering the woman too often subtracted from her son’s biography, Andy Warhol’s Mother rebuts the myth of Warhol as sui generis. This book joins Maxwell King and Louise Lippincott’s excellent 2022 American Workman: The Life and Art of John Kane, about the early-20th-century self-taught Scottish immigrant painter, as a superlative study of working-class Pittsburgh art history that has been released by the city’s own University of Pittsburgh Press, which is quickly becoming the leading publisher on this subject. 

Classism often obscures the fertile proletariat soil from which much American modernist art grew, but studies such as Rusinko’s remind us of the ethnic and working-class origins of those artists. For Julia Warhola was not just a passive actress in Andy’s films, but the calligrapher and co-illustrator for books like the charming 25 Cats Named Sam and One Blue Pussy and Holy Cats (1954), which combined her love of angels and felines. As a solo artist, she won a Certificate of Merit from the American Institute for Graphic Arts in recognition of the 1957 album cover design for the seminal experimental record The Story of Moondog. And yet the attribution of these collaborative works? “Andy Warhol’s mother.” Rusinko’s book reminds us that she, Julia, was much more than that.

Figure 5.19

Ink drawing by Julia Warhola (photo by Haytham ad-Din, used with permission)Figure 5.17

Julia Warhola, “Three Angels” (undated), ink on Strathmore paper (photo by Haytham ad-Din, used with permission)Figure 5.16

Ink drawing by Julia Warhola (photo by Haytham ad-Din, used with permission)Andy Warhols Mother

Cover of Andy Warhol’s Mother: The Woman Behind the Artist by Elaine Rusinko (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024)

Andy Warhol’s Mother: The Woman Behind the Artist (2024) by Elaine Rusinko is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press and is available online and through independent booksellers.


🔗 Source: Original Source

📅 Published on: 2025-01-26 23:03:00

🖋️ Author: Ed Simon – An expert in architectural innovation and design trends.

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Note: This article was reviewed and edited by the archot editorial team to ensure accuracy and quality.

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