It was an age of global connection and heaving, irreversible changes at every level of American life—mass culture, mass media, mass consumption, mass production, mass murder, the vernacular Mass. And yet, let me draw your attention to a secondhand shop in Manhattan. Where, in that musty wonderland of secrets, mysteries, and improbable juxtapositions, a man with funny hair rummages around. We don’t know what was there. Perhaps an old eggbeater, some pants, a World War II helmet slightly damaged, its owner long gone. Stuff. Then the man with the funny hair finds something he likes. It is a terra-cotta reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper in relief. In fact, it is not a reproduction. It is a reproduction of a reproduction of a reproduction. This suits the man just fine. He likes it and takes it home, where he will do great things with it.
The man is Andy Warhol. The flea-market booty will play a role in the massive undertaking at the end of his life: a series of works that engage with Leonardo’s Last Supper. Then undergoing extensive restoration, Leonardo’s painting dominated the news. Influential art patron Alexander Iolas sought to capitalize on the publicity by commissioning Warhol (for one million dollars) to create works that responded to it. Warhol created numerous variations on the Renaissance work, themselves iterations of the numerous iterations available in mass production, such as the terra cotta he found at the flea market. Hence, one of the most iconic religious images shakes hands with pop art. In Paul Elie’s The Last Supper, Warhol’s work is pivotal in its processing of controversies about art and sexuality through religious motifs, something Elie characterizes as the “crypto-religious.”
Investigating the crypto-religious is Elie’s venture in this book. Readers of Elie’s first two books, The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Reinventing Bach, will be familiar with his interest in complicating the boundary between secular and sacred with close readings of literary and musical works through the lens of their makers’ spiritual struggles and developments. One way he expands on these ideas in The Last Supper is by foregrounding the visual arts in his analysis. But a second, more central expansion comes from his concept of the crypto-religious. He borrows the term from the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who wrote to Thomas Merton that “I have always been crypto-religious and in a conflict with the political aspect of Polish Catholicism.” For Miłosz, this meant concealing his religious inclinations within his homeland’s Communist regime and alluding to early Christians hiding in Roman crypts. Elie expands the phrase to cover much more: “Crypto-religious art is work that incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief. It’s work that raises the question of what the person who made it believes, so that the question of what it means to believe is crucial to the work’s effect: as you see it, hear it, read it, listen to it, you wind up reflecting on your own beliefs.”