Warhol’s Death and Disaster

Abstract 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. While previous scholarship on the 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 choosing to appropriate tabloid images of otherwise anonymous fatalities in the Disaster series, Warhol dignifies disaster victims as the secular martyrs of a rapidly modernizing world, where we are often mere casualties sacrificed in the name of industrial progress. Through his utilization of Byzantine visual language, Warhol’s Death and Disaster works venerate victims of tragedy, moving them away from their former lives as tabloid spectacles and instead positioning them as secular icons of the twentieth century—their images memorialized as the saints and martyrs of our time.