Last Supper (Warhol)

Last Supper is a series of silkscreen paintings and prints made by the American artist Andy Warhol in 1986, based on Leonardo da Vinci's mural The Last Supper. It is widely regarded as Warhol's final major body of work and perhaps his largest. The gallerist Alexander Iolas commissioned a monumental Last Supper painting and six smaller works in 1985 for 150,000 dollars, and Warhol expanded the project into more than 100 silkscreen paintings and prints. Working from a black-and-white printed reproduction that he cropped, stacked, overlaid and rotated, he used strategies of appropriation, seriality and repetition, and some versions are doubled and stacked in colours such as yellow, pink, green, blue and camouflage. Warhol, raised a Byzantine Catholic, remained a devout Catholic, and the art historian Jane Dillenberger describes the series as the largest group of religious art by any American artist. It was first shown in Milan in January to March 1987, shortly before Warhol died in February 1987.