A little more than a mile south of Northside Scrap Metals, a family business that recycles “copper, brass, aluminum, cans, wire or unwanted metal”, is the Andy Warhol museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, dedicated to one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century. The owner George Warhola resumed the operation of the recovery operation in 1986 of his father Paul, who was Andy's brother. “I come from nowhere,” said Warhol when he asked his origins, the ethnic “A” at the end of his name of Carpatho-Rusyn moved when he moved to New York in 1949 to work in advertising. However, he came from somewhere, and if he was ambivalent about Pittsburgh alive, the city adopted and celebrated it as a favorite son in death. In the end, Warhol was a product in the working class, industrial and immigrant Pittsburgh, such as the metals of the Northside scrap should indicate it. Like his nephew – who in interviews Affectionately recalls having visited his uncle in Manhattan – Warhol collected the scrap and reused it. The various studios where he produced his work, from the east of the 47th to the East 33rd, have always been called “the factory”, after all.
Warhol took Pittsburgh with him, then literally as his mother Julia, a pious byzantine Catholic woman, concerned with a coal mine and a worker of biographical construction in the learned Elaine Rusinko's Andy Warhol's mother: the woman behind the artist (2024). Julia Warhola, the little woman dressed in black born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire who mainly spoke Rusyn, was a recognizable working class common Pittsburgher in the middle of the 20th century, the faithful immigrant mother supporting her husband and children. And when her son Andy moved to New York, she went with him.
That Julia lived with Andy for two decades in a scene that included Candy Chérie And Lou Reed, Edie Sedgewick and Ultra Violet, cannot be so easily dismissed. Rusinko describes “the innate artistic sense which has flowed from its cultural background of Carpatho-Rusyn and enlightened its life in the mountains of Eastern Europe, the cans of Pittsburgh and the tumult of New York.” As an associate professor emeritus of Russian language and literature at the University of Maryland, in the county of Baltimore, Rusinko provides a necessary corrective for a generation of biographers who “have, at best, perplexed by the mother of Warhol, and at worst, derisory”. The first scholar having an in-depth knowledge of the culture of Carpatho-rusyn to write on Warhol, the engaging book of Rusinko will undoubtedly prove to be the final study of the deep influence of Julia on his son.
Rusinko explains how Warhol emerged from a “potentially painful life” in which immigrants from Eastern Europe were ridiculed as “Moulin Hunkies” and men like his father would die in industrial accidents, but that his emergence in a glamorous world of “renown and unimaginable fortune” was largely due to her mother, by Poverty, Hardhip, and its bad ”. Without the emotional support of Julia, it is difficult to imagine what would have become his eccentric son and growing queer in the difficult streets of South Oakland. Due to Julia's work cleaning houses, Warhol was able to take childhood art courses at the Carnegie Museum of Art and attend the College of Fine Arts of the Carnegie of Technology Institute, today Carnegie Mellon University.
But the support was not all she gave to her son – Julia Warhola also provided an artistic inspiration. As Rusinko clearly does, Julia was a woman of tireless talent and creativity. Calligrapher, embroiderer and illustrator, Julia has created avant-garde sculptures and ready to use most Warholian goods: the tin box. Having exchanged the ethnic icons of the Saint John Chrysostom church in the Four Mile Run district of Pittsburgh for the English Gothic of the Holy Vincent of the Upper East Vincent Ferrer, where Julia attended the daily mass with her son (both crossing in the Byzantine way), the artist's mother brought her own sensitivity to New York.
Appearing in the experimental films of his son, especially the years 1966 Mrs Warhol,, is one of what led art criticisms like Gilda Williams to describe Julia Warhola as “Oddball, a foreign mother” of the artist, rejected as a “woman who has never adapted to the American lifestyle”. Rusinko avoids such erroneous perceptions, rather interpreting Andy's mother as a collaborator; She writes that “the influence (has been) unconsciously transmitted from Julia to Andy … apparent in her temperament and her vision of the world, a earth-to-terre practice and a superstitious mysticism”.
The woman's refocuser has too often subtracted from the biography of her son, Andy Warhol's mother refute the myth of Warhol as of their kind. This book joins Maxwell King and the Excellent 2022 by Louise Lippincott American Workman: The Life and Art of John Kane,, About the painter of self -taught Scottish immigrant at the beginning of the 20th century, as a superlative study of the history of the art class of Pittsburgh which was published by the own press of the University of Pittsburgh in the city, which quickly becomes the main publisher on this subject.
Classism often obscures the fertile proletariat soil from which a large part of the American modernist art has grown, but studies such as Rusinko remind us of the ethnic and workers' origins of these artists. Because Julia Warhola was not only a passive actress in Andy's films, but the calligrapher and co-illustrator for books like The Charming 25 cats named Sam and a blue pussy And Holy cats (1954), which combined his love of angels and felines. As a solo artist, she won a Certificate of Merit of the American Institute for Graphic Arts in recognition of the design of the album of the 1957 album for the seminal experimental file The story of Moondog. And yet, the attribution of these collaborative works? “Mother of Andy Warhol.” Rusinko's book reminds us that she, Julia, was much more than that.
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 via independent booksellers.
