So here are these Slovak churches along the river towns, golden domes against a thick, grey sky...the Monogahela moves slowly toward its junction with the Allegheny to form the Ohio...still brown as chocolate at its junction in Pittsburgh...and whom do we find by the merging of these waters and cultures, but Andrew Warhola....
Or his museum...now that he has been dead some 30 years...has it been that long?
"Andrew Warhola, born Aug. 6, 1928, to Julia and Andrej Warhola, Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants from the village of Mikova in present-day Slovakia. They attended St. John Chrysotom Byzantine Catholic Church."
Ahhh the great exponent of pop art...he used to sell his drawings from the fruit and vegetable truck run by his brothers...his father's savings allowed him to go to the Carnegie Institute to study art..after his studies, he went to New York City, quickly becoming one of the most successful commercial illustrators in the city at the time advertising as an industry was exploding....
and, then, well, Andy Warhol the artist. But here is a connection...the Warhola and the Warhol (Americans, be they Carpatho-Rusyns...always reinventing themselves still bearing the traces of ancestry...
But the Byzantine churches is so full of icons...sacred images whose transparency allows the viewer to gain a glimpse of the divine...
But, of course, he did more than portraits (tho' man did he make a lot of money at that)...he did movies, made some of the first graphic art, experimented with styles and music, held court at The Factory...and, yet, this continuity of iconography...out of the churches...and into the worship of celebrity and glamor...well, that may prove his true legacy.
