UC Davis

In his Death and Disaster series, Andy Warhol’s Byzantine Catholic upbringing and beliefs take shape in his portraits of celebrities and unnamed disaster victims alike, converging into an iconography rooted in American daily life. While previous scholarship on Warhol’s Death and Disaster series describes Warhol’s representation of death as consumerist, callous, and contributing to spectacle culture driven by mass media, my work instead focuses on Warhol’s adoption and transformation of the Byzantine iconic tradition in his Death and Disaster series. Using Byzantine visual language, Warhol elevates press photographs of both Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy-Onassis to the realm of the sacred, emphasizing the symbolic resonance of their tremendous cultural influence. In choosing to appropriate tabloid images of otherwise anonymous fatalities in the Disaster series, Warhol additionally dignifies disaster victims in a way which was perhaps most familiar to him: as the secular martyrs of a rapidly modernizing world, where we are often mere casualties sacrificed in the name of industrial progress. As Warhol glorifies the dead in his Death and Disaster series, he allows these images to pivot from their former lives as tabloid spectacles, instead taking on new meaning in Warhol’s contemporary version of Byzantine Catholic iconography.