Andy Warhol's Brother John dies.

Obituary: John Warhola, arts administrator


Published Date: 30 December 2010
John Warhola, arts administrator.

Born: 31 May, 1925, in Pittsburgh, USA.

Died: 24 December, 2010, in Freedom, Pennsylvania, aged 85.
John Warhola was an older brother of the Pop artist Andy Warhol and one of the original three trustees of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Although Warhola was only three years older than Andy, the youngest of three brothers,
he assumed a parental role after the death of their father in 1942. With Paul, the oldest brother, about to get married, their father, Andrej Warhola, called his middle son to his bedside and instructed him to take charge of Andy and make sure Andy attended college, for which he had set aside enough post office savings to cover two years of education.

Victor Bockris, in his book Warhol: The Biography, quoted Warhola as recalling that his father had said, "You're going to be real proud of him, he's going to be highly educated, he's going to college."

John Warhola scraped together money to help Andy finish his education at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University). After his younger brother left for New York in 1949, he called him every Sunday for the next 38 years to keep tabs on him.

Andy Warhol, who dropped the final "a" from the family name, died in 1987 and left instructions that his estate be used to create a foundation for the support of the visual arts and that his brother John be made a trustee. Warhola served as a vice president of the foundation for 20 years, playing an important role in establishing the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and creating a Warhol museum near the village in Slovakia where their parents were born.

John Warhola was born in 1925. After college, he worked in a machine shop and drove an ice cream van before going to work in 1966 for Sears, where he installed television antennas and sold appliance parts in a warehouse.

One of Warhola's first initiatives as a trustee of the Warhol Foundation was to give several Warhol drawings to the town of Medzilaborce in Slovakia, near Mikova. More artworks followed, and the foundation donated the money to open a museum there in 1991. The Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art, as it is now known, has 20 Warhols in its permanent collection, which consists entirely of works by Warhol and other family members, notably his brother Paul, a scrap dealer and chicken farmer who took up art late in life.

John Warhola was a strong, persistent voice arguing that Pittsburgh, too, should have a museum dedicated to his brother's work.