Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art
Medzylaborce and Andy Warhol
MúzeumCafé 8.
Twenty years ago Medzylaborce in Slovakia was rather reticent about the idea of opening a museum devoted to Andy Warhol, the daredevil of American pop art – at least simply on the grounds that his parents were born in the locality. Recalling the past and manufacturing the present are not easy in eastern Slovakia. The concrete bunker of the former community centre housing the Andy Warhol Museum stands between the shrines of past and present, the snow-white Greek Catholic church and the grey square block of the shopping centre. In front of the museum building there is an uneven area with a ‘brass Andy’ and umbrella operating as a fountain in the middle. Diagonally across stands the Andy guesthouse with its lifeless windows. Further away a Warhol poster is ill at ease fixed to a wall.
When Ondrej Warhola and Julia Zavaczky got married in Medzylaborce in 1909 there was only the church, apart from horses and carts jolting around, and the village could mostly be proud of the fact that at one point Emperor Franz Joseph had crossed it on his way to Galicia. There was nothing inducing Ondrej Warhol to stay, so the miner set off for the promised land of America, his wife following him a couple of years later to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Later the abandoned world, the village elders and the pine woods came alive only in the stories Julia told her three sons, Paul, John and Andrew. Her thick accent spiced the days, the stories about eastern Europe as well as the chapters of Dick Tracy which the middle son, Andrew born in 1928, was especially enthusiastic about.
Although later Andrew usually introduced himself as a “man from nowhere”, it said Pittsburgh in the relevant column of his birth certificate.
Warhol became an icon. When asked about beauty he first mentioned his well-trodden shoes, when about his future he said he would really like to be reincarnated in the shape of a huge ring on Rotschild’s finger. The price of his works rose steeply and his popularity among art connoisseurs then art treasure thieves increased – it even occurred that his paintings once disappeared on the very day of an opening.
Andy Warhol became a brand name in his own lifetime and now in death by ‘moving in’ can even breath life into a small village. That must have convinced the decision makers in Medzylaborce. At first they were rather reluctant, but eventually they swept their prudishness under the carpet and succumbed to the request of Andy’s brother, John. Thus, three years after his death in 1987 the emperor of pop art had his own museum in Medzylaborce, in addition to one in Pittsburgh. The concrete block of the local community centre was allocated for keeping his memory alive and the village with its population of 6700 went ahead ‘warholing’ the place. In the early 1990s the media talked of 30 million Slovak crowns, bus stops and façades turned into pop art, and the collection was developed with the help of anonymous wealthy Slovak patrons who made purchases and loans.
With the museum eastern Europe deprived of its talent could at last lean back at ease, having managed to gain something from the myth its ancestors created far away. That is what you feel when browsing the museum’s website and can acknowledge on seeing the façade which seems full of colourful glass panes – things may sometimes succeed in this part of the world, too. In the spring the museum is celebrating Warhol’s 80th birthday with a gigantic exhibition.