ABSTRACT
In this chapter Jewell Homad Johnson draws attention to a growing perception that Warhol’s ‘Pop Art’ is more than just surface: it contains a religious dimension that, Johnson argues, was too radical to be appreciated by Warhol’s contemporaries. Johnson argues that Byzantine Catholic beliefs held by Warhol are manifest in his portraits and ‘ritual’ objects, combining to form a system of iconography based on American daily life, which Johnson terms ‘Medieval Pop’. Johnson addresses a number of Warhol’s works, notably his Marilyn Monroe paintings and his famous Brillo Boxes. With reference to the latter, Johnson stresses that to read Warhol’s art as spiritual is in no sense a diminution of its materiality – indeed, contemporary artistic voicings of the spiritual depend on and require the material and the everyday just as much as a non-religious reading of his work.
