“There is no lonelier person in American life than the Slavic immigrant woman.” Elaine Rusinko cites this passage from Olga Bessie Pesotsky’s The Slavic Immigrant Woman in her extensive biography of Julia Warhola, Andy Warhol’s Mother. Rusinko’s book is the first to trace the Warhola family’s Carpatho-Rusyn roots and put the spotlight on Julia herself. What fascinates me is that the title, Andy Warhol’s Mother, makes an immediate assertion. Julia Warhola: An Annotated Biography or The Fantastical Life of Julia Warhola would have both been different books. Yet Julia signed her drawings not as her own name but as Andy Warhol’s Mother in the distinctive curlicue of her handwriting.
Rusinko situates Julia Warhola within her community of Slavic mothers, wives, and daughters in Pittsburgh’s slums, implying perhaps that we remember this one only because she is Andy Warhol’s mother. Julia was tough, at times flamboyant, and, yes, lonely, maintaining her family farm in the Carpathian Mountains during wartime before going to rejoin her husband in America, and then providing for her family after her husband’s death. Though it is a biography of one person, Andy Warhol’s Mother feels like a communal history.
The Untold Story of Julia Warhola
Rusinko begins the book by remembering how a cemetery plot just beside Warhol’s had her own name, Rusinko, on it. Warhol rarely referenced his identity as Rusyn—he had little concern for identity at all, in any category. But in Warhol’s heritage, Rusinko saw another angle for his life story and a different context to frame his life. The metamorphosis that Warhol went through was not dissimilar to Ulya’s Zavacka’s transformation into Julia Warhola. Ulya’s years-long journey to America is the story of a transformation from girl to woman, from maiden to mother, the only metamorphosis available to a woman in her circumstances. Rusinko remembers that on her immigration paperwork, Julia wrote her occupation as “farmer,” and an official crossed it out and wrote “mother.”
Perusing numerous biographies of Warhol and Basquiat can sometimes feel like digging up the graves of the art world’s most profitable ghosts. But Andy Warhol’s Mother is a different look at Warhol, one that if he were still alive, he might have objected to. It is, however, nonetheless a humanizing look at a larger-than-life figure. Warhol often told fables about his heritage that obscured its reality, particularly about his father.
Warhol Through a Rusyn Lens
Andy Warhol’s Mother is fascinating in part because it shows how Warhol’s heritage and identity is felt not because he claimed it loudly and proudly, but through small, subtle habits, an unyielding work ethic, a fastidious commitment to the Greek Catholic faith, and a no-nonsense quasi-nihilism familiar to anyone with a Central or Eastern European grandmother. Warhol’s flippant ethos of “Don’t think about making art, just get it done” could have been said by my own grandmother.
Andy Warhol’s Mother does not spell out the unspoken question of whether Julia might have been a commercial artist in her own right, or a high-living Bohemian if she were free from the constraints of family life and tradition. It spends more time on who she actually was, and the place she came from. The Rusyns, a stateless people, had tight-knit communities in both Old and New Worlds. Miková, where Julia and Andrii Warhola were born, is in modern-day Slovakia, but Warhol identified himself as Czech or Austrian at various times. There’s an interesting sidebar in the book about a Ukrainian art institution claiming Warhol as Ukrainian by modern standards, which caused some controversy among Rusyns.
Born with a Flair for the Dramatic
One of the notable things about Andy Warhol’s Mother is that it is an academic text from an Eastern European Studies professor, not a pop biography. Rusinko also looks at the Rusyns as an insider, fluent in the language and more understanding of some of the cultural norms like parents living with their adult children. (Julia lived with Andy, which in the downtown art scene in New York was an oddity).
Like Warhol, Julia in some ways delighted in people’s misunderstanding of her. She spun fabulous tales about her lavish wedding in Miková that played into perceptions of Rusyns as backwards country folk. Even in the photo on her American interim passport, there’s a twinkle of mischief in her eye. The book characterizes her as at times neurotic and flighty but at others exuberant and warm. She charmed everyone from her Pittsburgh neighbors to her son’s New York scenesters.
Unraveling Warhol’s History
Within the book, there are tidbits of Pittsburgh history readers will find illuminating, too. One that stood out to me was that the Soho Public Baths building on Fifth Avenue on the way to the Birmingham Bridge, now abandoned, was a bathing house for the immigrant workers like the Warholas who didn’t have indoor plumbing. As I read, it came up for me that Julia’s support of her son’s’ creativity is something worth celebrating. More young people from immigrant families in Pittsburgh need that support. Arts education programs like The Andy Warhol Museum’s Pop District initiative aim to make Pittsburgh a place where the next Warhol might thrive.
Warhol once remarked to biographer John Perrault “The book should be about my mother. She’s so-o-o interesting.” Rusinko has fulfilled that wish. But like Andy, Julia resisted easy categorization. Her life isn’t quite the turn-of-the-century ideal of the American Dream where the streets are paved with gold. Nor is it the woeful story of the genius woman artist flattened by patriarchy. Julia Warhola’s story is all her own. If there is a call to action within Andy Warhol’s Mother, it is to think more deeply about our own histories and to approach our ancestors with curiosity.
Story by Emma Riva
Portrait of Julia Warhola by Andy Warhol
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