The title of author Elaine Rusinko’s biography “Andy Warhol’s Mother” might at first seem just book-jacket shorthand, or even a bit of ironic self-effacement. After all, how many readers would recognize the name of its subject, Julia Warhola?
But in fact, the title is a sly reference to an episode early in the artist’s career, when a design award given to Julia for her contribution to one of her son’s album covers was made out to “Andy Warhol’s Mother.”
Was this merely a marketing ploy by the ever-canny Warhol, then a successful ad man but still years from renown as a Pop artist? Or did it also, as Rusinko’s thoroughly researched biography suggests, point toward something deeper in the complex and poignant relationship between the unschooled Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant and her world-famous 29-year-old son?
Indeed, as Warhol himself once told an interviewer, “The book should be about my mother. She’s sooo interesting.”
From the mountains to the city
Rusinko, a professor emerita of Russian language and literature at the University of Maryland, delivers the first full-length biography of Julia more than a half-century after her death. “Andy Warhol’s Mother: The Woman Behind the Artist” (University of Pittsburgh Press) draws on previously untapped archival material as well as Rusinko’s comprehensive knowledge of Carpatho-Rusyn culture — a culture she contends was an underappreciated influence on Warhol.
Rusinko is herself of Carpatho-Rusyn heritage: Her grandparents hail from a village about five miles from Miková, the hamlet in what’s now Slovakia where Julia Zavacky was born, grew up and met and married Andrii Warhola, Andy’s father.
The book actually grew from Rusinko’s interest in Warhol.
“Everyone said she was the greatest influence on him, but no one had really studied her,” Rusinko said.
One challenge was the simple passage of time. Julia was born in 1891, in a mountain village where written documentation was minimal, and no one alive recalls her early years. Though the couple married in 1909, Andrii emigrated just three years later to escape conscription in what was then Austria-Hungary, and Julia didn’t follow him to Pittsburgh until 1921.
Rusinko contextualizes Julia’s early life with a deep dive into traditional Carpatho-Rusyn culture, from the folk and religious traditions that underpinned life in Miková to what was likely her horrific (if largely undocumented) experience there during World War I.
Those familiar with Andy Warhol’s life will recall his working-class childhood as one of three brothers on Oakland’s Dawson Street, his sickliness and burgeoning artistic talent, and the bequest from his late father that allowed him to study at Carnegie Tech.
Some will also remember that a few years after Warhol left to seek his fortune in Manhattan, Julia joined him there. She’d live with her youngest son most of the rest of her life — about 20 years, during which she not only kept house but also contributed her distinctive handwriting to his pre-Pop projects (including that award-winning album cover).
“An inveterate fabulist”
Warhol never publicly claimed any ethnic heritage. But by focusing on Julia, Rusinko foregrounds the deep and abiding influence on Andy of both her strong personality and her Carpatho-Rusyn roots more generally. A long passage depicting the elaborate, multi-day rituals that were weddings in Miková helps explain Julia’s own theatrical personality.
“She was very performative in her way of speaking,” Rusinko said. “And I think some of this went down to Andy, who, of course, made movies where people were just performing themselves.”
Such community traditions persisted to a large degree in within Pittsburgh’s tight-knit Carpatho-Rusyn community centered in Oakland, Uptown (then Soho) and lower Greenfield. The role of his family’s Byzantine Catholic faith has also been increasingly explored, and Rusinko too explores potential influences on Warhol from the music to the iconography critics have seen echoed in Warhol’s silkscreens of celebrities like Elvis and Marilyn.
With his often superstitious view of the world, and a dyed-in-the-wool work ethic, Rusinko contends, Andy Warhol was a lot more like his immigrant forebears than his latter-day cosmopolitan image has led many to believe.
If all this makes it sound like Julia was just a passive transmitter of cultural information to her son, Rusinko makes it clear that’s not the case.
Young Andy was a classic mama’s boy, and Rusinko finds the seeds of Warhol’s entrepreneurial and even artistic spirit in his accompanying Julia when she went door to door in wealthy neighborhoods selling flowers she’d fashioned from tissue paper or tin cans. Somewhat unusually for an immigrant mother of the time, she encouraged Andy’s interest in drawing, as well. And Rusinko calls her “an inveterate fabulist” whose habit of embellishing any story she told seems to have rubbed off on Andy, who routinely played loose with the truth in his interviews and writings.
A private conversation
Unusually among researchers into the Warhola family, Rusinko is fluent in Rusyn, and in digging into the archives of Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum she uncovered previously untranslated materials, including letters to and from Julia and even some audio and video recordings.
The audio, dating to the 1950s, capture Julia singing folk and religious songs — she’d been a cantor in her youth — and telling stories of the sort she’d told her children when they were young. (One is a folk-style yarn about a hobo who magically becomes rich.)
A curious video Rusinko describes dates from just a year before her death. Warhol, testing a new camera, trains it on his mother and converses with her in Rusyn, which he understood better than he spoke.
“He asks her, ‘Mom, do you want a sandwich?’ And she asks him, ‘When are you going away?’ Things like that,” says Ruskinko. “It’s not scripted here, they’re being themselves. It’s a private conversation.”
In Carpatho-Rusyn culture, Rusinko notes, it was common for mothers to care for their children until they married. That makes Julia and Andy’s lengthy cohabitation seem less odd (though Rusinko does explore to what degree Julia might have understood her son’s sexuality). As the ‘60s wore on, and Julia’s (unpaid!) contributions to her son’s work waned, she nonetheless remained well known to those on the famous scene of Warhol’s Factory, and was even one of the subjects of a 1966 Esquire magazine spread interviewing the mothers of famous American men.
If the biography’s point is that Julia deserves to be recalled independent of her famous son, it is often difficult to disentangle the two. Indeed, Rusinko describes their relationship as a mysteriously codependent one.
Yet Julia emerges as her own personality. Rusinko’s research included interviews with her surviving nieces and grandchildren.
“They say she was just wonderful. She was so attentive to all the children,” Rusinko said.
They recalled visits to her and Warhol in New York. “They would pray with her and with Andy,” Rusinko said. “Before he went out at night, he would call to his mother and say, mom, come on. And they would say the Lord's Prayer together in Rusyn. And he would go out for a night on the town.”
“I didn't hear a negative word about her. Everybody just was very, very positive. She was very loving. She was very huggy. She would put her arm around you. She wouldn't hurt a fly.”
