When I first visited Andy Warhol’s grave, at Saint John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery, in suburban Pittsburgh, I gazed up a grassy slope toward the burial site of the Warhola family. Around Andy’s small but elegant polished-black-granite headstone, etched with the three-barred Eastern-rite cross and an image of praying hands, fans and pilgrims had left Campbell’s soup cans, holiday ornaments, and other tokens of admiration.
Further up the hill, behind Andy’s final resting place, a larger tombstone marked the grave of his parents, Andrew and Julia Warhola. But what stopped me in my tracks was the stone just in front of Andy’s, on which was carved, in large block letters, my own surname, Rusinko.
At the time, I was just beginning my work on Warhol, and the coincidence seemed to be a sign. As a teenager, I often came across Warhol in the astrological guides popular at the time—our birthdays were one day apart in August, although separated by decades.
As I learned more about the artist and my own ancestry, I discovered that we had more in common. Warhol’s parents emigrated from Miková, a small village in Slovakia, just a few miles from Čertižné and Vladiča, where my paternal grandparents had lived. When Warhol died, in 1987, I recognized in the broadcast newsclip of his burial the rituals of the Byzantine Catholic religion, in which I was raised.
I then began to study Warhol in earnest. What interested me about him was not his art, which has been covered extensively by experts. Rather, I was intrigued by how this quintessential American artist emerged from Carpatho-Rusyn working-class roots. Over the next few years, I traveled to Miková and made several visits to the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum, in Pittsburgh. I stumbled upon my book project when I read Warhol’s remark to the art critic John Perreault, who was planning a biography of Warhol: “The book should be about my mother. She’s so-o-o interesting.” (The biography was never published.)
I learned that Julia Warhola has a remarkable story of her own that deserves telling. After her 1909 marriage, her husband immigrated to America to avoid conscription in the Austro-Hungarian Army, leaving Julia to deal with the death of their first child, a daughter. She also faced alone the horrors of war, when the Russian and Austro-Hungarian armies ravaged her village.
When she re-united with her husband in Pittsburgh, she gave birth to three boys. The youngest, Andy, was a sickly child confined to bed for long periods. His first art studio was his bedroom, and his first assistant was his mother. She drew pictures with him, told him Rusyn folktales, and when he chose not to play softball with his brothers she subtly encouraged his eccentricity.
It is uncertain whether Andy invited her or whether she just showed up on his doorstep, but in 1951, the New York phase of a mother-son relationship began. Julia, then about 60, lived with Andy for the next 20 years, cooking and caring for him, signing his canvases, entertaining his friends, and praying for his soul. When Andy was working as a commercial artist, Julia colored pictures and transcribed script in her ornate, old-world calligraphy. If she was credited at all for her work, it was as “Andy Warhol’s mother.”
In the 1950s, Warhol published Julia’s drawings of cats under the title Holy Cats by Andy Warhols’ Mother, a companion book to his own drawings published in 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, both written by Julia, with creative spelling and punctuation errors that Andy relished.
In the 610 boxes Warhol called Time Capsules, which are preserved in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, he saved items of his mother’s clothing, her prayer books, her correspondence, and other minutiae from the 20 years they lived together. In interviews, nephews and grandchildren fondly remembered praying together with Bubba Julia and Andy, savoring her chicken soup and participating in her delight at playing the numbers. A talented singer, Julia recorded Rusyn folk songs and religious chants on tape for her family.
In her later years, Andy turned his video camera on his mother, offering a rare and intimate glimpse into the mother-son relationship. From these details and more, I pieced together a tapestry of the life of a simple immigrant woman who had a hand in creating one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.
Elaine Rusinko is a professor emerita at the University of Maryland
