Santa Claus is coming to town

Andy Warhol found Christmas a tricky time, yet threw himself into the festivities and, when he decided to illustrate his series on American myths, he had no doubt he should include the jolly old man in the bright red suit

- Carla Passino

CHRISTMAS,' quipped Andy Warhol, 'is when you have to go to the bank and get crisp money to put in envelopes from the stationery store for tips. After you tip the doorman, he goes on sick leave or quits and the new one isn't impressed.' Rather 'Bah, humbug!' of him, but then the American pop artist would have had every reason to resent the holidays. Growing up in a poor family of Carpatho-Rusyn origins, his Christmas had not only been on a different day from most Americans—the Warholas, who practised Byzantine-rite Catholicism, celebrated on January 6—but it had also been meagre: ‘When I was a child, I never had a fantasy about having a maid, what I had a fantasy about having was candy,’ he wrote in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Then, as an adult, the distance—not only physical—that separated him from his relatives made Christmas a tricky time, especially after he sent his mother, who had suffered a stroke, back to his native Pittsburgh in 1971: the sense of guilt kept eating him up every December for more than a decade after she had died.

Even when he had gathered a surrogate family of his own—a vast entourage of friends, acquaintances and hangers-on—the season to be merry often turned out to be anything but. In 1950, at a Christmas Eve party in which he had perhaps entertained hopes of spending time with the poet Ralph Ward, of whom he was enamoured, their friend George Klauber got badly hurt, after which both an ambulance and the police arrived at the scene: ‘Andy was very upset and left immediately, but waited downstairs for Ralph, thinking that he and Ralph could go off together,’ recalled Klauber. ‘Unfortunately for Andy, Ralph came with me to the hospital.’

‘The old man in red was the emblem of materialism’