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Three decades of visitors to The Andy Warhol Museum notwithstanding, the average person outside Southwestern Pennsylvania still probably doesn’t much associate Warhol himself with Pittsburgh.
Inevitably, he’s linked to New York City, where he lived most of his life and won global fame as an artist and scene-maker. Rather less so Pittsburgh, where he was merely born and formally schooled.
Warhol is popularly linked even less with Slovakia, the country where his parents, Andrej and Julia, were born. But Slovakians themselves seem to be an exception to that rule. On Feb. 22, the Slovak Republic’s ambassador to the U.S., at the behest of Slovakian President Zuzana Čaputová, posthumously presented the Order of the White Double Cross of the Second Class to Warhol “for promoting the Slovak Republic’s good name abroad.”
The Order of the White Double Cross — to movie fan Warhol, the name might have suggested the title of some lost 1940s film noir — is Slovakia’s highest state decoration, reserved for foreign citizens. While it’s usually granted to politicians and diplomats, the Second Class medal Warhol received has also gone to folks including opera singer Edita Gruber, NHL Hall of Famer Stan Mikita and American astronaut Eugen Andrew Cernan.
Ambassador Radovan Javorčík bestowed the beribboned medal to Warhol’s nephew Donald Warhola in a private event at The Warhol, while they stood in front of two paired Warhols: a 1978 self-portrait and a 1974 likeness of his mother, Julia.
Speaking after the brief, informal ceremony, Javorčík noted the late artist’s prominence in Slovakia has risen and fallen.
“Andy Warhol is a symbol, is a story, he’s an inspiration, and his name was basically banned in the former Czechoslovakia under the Communist regime” as a symbol of Western decadence, Javorčík said.
Warhol’s ethnicity is clear: Mikova, the tiny mountain village his parents came from, was home to Ruthenians, sometimes called Carpatho-Rusyns. But Carpatho-Rusyns never had a country of their own, and in part because of how borders shifted in the 20th century, Andrej and Julia Warhola’s nation of origin is a matter of historical perspective.
When they were born, Mikova was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1918, about when Andrej permanently emigrated to escape conscription during World War I, the territory became part of the newly created state of Czechoslovakia. In 1992, after the fall of Eastern-bloc Communism, that country split into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.
Just as the latter claimed Mikova, so Slovaks today claim Warhol.
“We don’t steal him from anywhere, we just say that he was from Slovakia, and he was proud to recall that he came from eastern Slovakia,” said Javorčík. He referenced some of Warhol’s iconic artworks.
“Everybody wants to have the Campbell’s Soup can. Everybody wants to have the cows … It’s like family silver everyone wants to polish and have on the cupboard.”
There’s some irony here. Warhol’s parents left what’s now Slovakia because they figured they’d be happier elsewhere. (Economic prospects in Mikova were meager, and Julia survived devastating Russian and German fighting there before joining her husband in Pittsburgh.) Decades later, after young Carnegie Tech graduate Andy Warhola fled his hometown for Manhattan with a similar alacrity — and the similar aim of improving his fortunes — he formally dropped the foreign-sounding final “a” from his surname.
Moreover, there’s scant evidence Warhol intentionally did much to “promote [Slovakia’s] good name abroad.” In his massive 2020 biography, “Warhol,” Blake Gopnik writes that Warhol never publicly claimed any specific ethnic heritage, instead saying, “I always feel American — 100 percent.”
However, Warhol was nothing if not a master of the invented public persona. Donald Warhola, who often visited his uncle from the 1960s until Warhol’s death, in 1987, and worked for him briefly, said that, in private, at least, Warhol embraced his heritage.
“He was definitely connected. He spoke the language,” Warhola said. “My grandmother [Julia] would speak to Uncle Andy in her native tongue, and then Uncle Andy would answer her in English.” (Julia lived with her famous son in New York for 20 years, until shortly before her death, in 1972.)
Warhola, now vice president of the New York-based Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and its liaison to the Warhol Museum, said he would also converse with his uncle about distant relatives still in Czechoslovakia. “He never lost his cultural identity, for sure.”
Meanwhile, as the artist who did more than any other to demolish the wall between commercial and fine art, Warhol’s work would seem to have little in it of the old country. But Warhola finds evidence in an unexpected place: his uncle’s sense of humor, as expressed through his famous oxidation paintings.
Those are the late-1970s canvases Warhol coated in metallic paint and then had friends pee on, for an abstract effect. An experiment? A seasoned provocateur’s put-on? Donald Warhola instead sees the paintings as evidence of the tongue-in-cheek Slovakian humor he witnessed on his own visits there.
“Personally I believe that was a way that he was making art that people could smile, and laugh,” Warhola said.
