In 1948, Andy Warhol was still Andrew Warhola: the son of Carpatho-Rusyn emigrants, Pittsburgh native, ardent Byzantine Catholic, child of the Depression, and 21-year-old art school student. He was also a resident of 3252 Dawson Street, where he had been raised with his two brothers, Paul and John, by his working-class parents, Andrej and Julia, and which was his home until he moved to New York in 1949. The $3,200 two-bedroom house was modest, but nonetheless it provided luxuries that before then had been unknown to the Warholas, including a furnace and bathroom with cold and hot running water. 

 

It was this Andrew Warhola that captured his family residence in a prodigious watercolor for a university assignment—an incredible relic of one of the most iconic figures of modern art history. Expertly manipulating the textural versatility of the medium to articulate varying shades of red, Living Room depicts the worn and beloved heart of the Warhola residence, adorned with the family’s shabby maroon sofa and armchair, wooden rocking chair, and brick fireplace that Andrej built. Redolent of the exquisitely not-quite-resolved interiors of Pierre Bonnard, Warhol’s expressive submission immediately stood out against those of his classmates—especially Philip Pearlstein’s, which is now held in The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh—that were characterized by a more academic and observation-driven approach. The work, which has remained in the Warhola family until now, is a rare painted example of the 20^th century master’s hand, executed before he transitioned to his silkscreen technique and machine aesthetic. 

 

A major in “pictorial design” at Carnegie Institute of Technology, Warhol spent his junior year consumed by Professor Robert Lepper’s required Individual and Social Analysis course. The spring semester of the class was dedicated to the so-called “Oakland Project,” a half-anthropological, half-visual study of the titular Pittsburgh neighborhood that lay beyond the university’s campus. “Professor Lepper conceived of it as more complex than our simply going into the thoroughfares as artist-reporters, recording everything in sight,” Bennard Perlman, Warhol’s classmate, recalled. “We were to become sociologists and anthropologists [ourselves].”ⁱ

 

 

"Andy did marvelous drawings [in 1948]… Everyone else would be very complicated, but he would just make it so simple, as it was. Everybody was surprised."
—Philip Pearlstein

One exercise called for the students—or, as Lepper called them, “pictorial anthropologists”—to visualize a living room for an imaginary Oakland family and elucidate in a supplemental written component how the depicted belongings denoted the unseen characters’ status and traits. Having lived in the working-class neighborhood for almost 15 years, the artist cleverly bent the rules and covertly rendered the Warhola residence for a multigenerational household of six. The family he envisioned bore a thinly veiled resemblance to his own: a European matriarch whose husband is deceased, just like Warhol’s father, lives with her American-born daughter (Warhol did have a sister, but she died at only a few weeks old). The daughter’s truck driver husband, as well as their three children—Warhol also had two siblings—round out the household. 

 

The artist’s explanatory essay, typed by Warhol and still affixed to the reverse of the present work, attributes the “foreign” taste of the living room, expressed in the tattered Oriental carpet and lace doilies, to the immigrant mother’s upbringing overseas. The small children are responsible for the mess, manifested by disheveled rugs and wrinkled newspaper; they “play and eat in the living room” and “climb and jump on the furniture.” In a sense, Warhol handed himself a more difficult task than was assigned: to understand not only what his family home and belongings said about himself, but also what they might say about their other owners in a parallel universe. Lepper had meant to demonstrate to his students the ostensible objectivity of social science, but Living Room subtly undermined this premise, betraying that many interpretations can be true at once. 

 

The work thus reveals as much about Warhol’s life and childhood as it does that of its hypothetical inhabitants. A focal point of the picture is the tabletop wooden radio in the back right corner of the room—the Warhola family’s first and only radio, spontaneously purchased by Andrej in an uncharacteristic moment of indulgence. This radio was one of Warhol’s first introductions to media and culture: when he was bedridden with St. Vitus’ Dance as a child, he listened along to various programs, including his favorite, The Shadow, a serial detective show whose eponymous character was an enduring figure of the American pulp era. By the 1940s, according to Warhol biographer Victor Bockris, the same radio “had become the family hearth, particularly with the war bulletins and voices of Hitler, Churchill, and Edward R. Murrow coming every night from Europe.”ⁱⁱ

 

"Living Room is a startlingly condensed, rich, incredibly well-observed and precociously complicated and bewitching picture that pulls us into its world… it’s an almost indispensable document of where he came from."
—Jerry Saltz 

The other focal point of the composition is the crucifix above the mantle, a memento of his father’s death with an evocative impact that is underscored by its intentional inclusion amidst the elimination of much of the Warhola décor. “He left out Mother’s holy pictures,” Paul recalled, “but he put in the cross from Dad’s funeral, on the fireplace where we always kept it.”ⁱⁱⁱ On one hand, the crucifix in Living Room signifies the artist’s religious upbringing, which would resurface in his later appropriation of Christian artworks such as The Last Supper. But for Warhol, as epitomized by the macabre image of Jesus on the cross, religion and death were inextricably linked—two sides of the same coin. When their father passed in 1942, his body was laid out in the living room for three days for mourning, as was customary in the Byzantine Catholic Church. The potential encounter with Andrej’s corpse terrified Warhol, who—then only 13 years old—hid under his bed and refused to emerge from his room until he was given permission to stay with extended family until the funeral. This traumatizing experience was the impetus of the artist’s crippling fear of death, one that would haunt him for the rest of his life and come frighteningly close to fruition when he was shot by radical feminist Valerie Solanas in 1968. 

 

 

 

Likening Living Room to Vincent van Gogh’s The Bedroom (1888), critic Jerry Saltz acclaimed the work’s intimate portrayal of the private space where Warhol’s spent his childhood, calling it an “indispensable document of where he came from.” It is not only an account of his formative years, however, but a harbinger of what was to come. Highlighted in countless museum exhibitions, such as the recent retrospective Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Living Room is a seminal example of Warhol’s signature negotiation of illusion and reality. The false narrative he playfully constructed for a place of deep personal significance to him presages his later unraveling of the glittering face of celebrity and stardom and the turbulent truth that lay behind it. One of the central tenets of his revolutionary approach, which was just becoming visible in Living Room, it was this same interrogation of identity that bridged Andy Warhol the icon and Andrew Warhola the person. 

 

i Bennard Perlman, “The Education of Andy Warhol,” in The Andy Warhol Museum: The Inaugural Publication, ed. Callie Angell et al., New York, 1994, p. 161-163.
ii Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 33.
iii Paul Warhola, quoted in Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, New York, 2014, p. 26.
iv Jerry Saltz, “Andy Warhol in Eight Works,” Vulture, November 8, 2018, online