Looking both ways, at the highest sacred art and at the lowest commercial design, and fusing them in this hallmark fashion, these late pictures seem to suggest that, for a Pop god, the meek and poor in spirit among artists are no less important than Raphael or Leonardo… The significance of Warhol's late black-and-white works based on advertising images and lettering is perhaps most apparent in these mural scale hybrids of the sacred and profane: the black-and-white images are Warhol's final subversive lexicon of street art images awaiting transposition into art gallery and museum contexts where they will expand post-Pop postmodern taste.
 
(C. Stuckey, Andy Warhol: Heaven and Hell Are Just One Breath Away! Late Paintings and Related Works, 1984-1986, New York 1992, pp. 28-31).
 
After having reinvented himself in the 1970s as the leading portraitist of his generation, the 1980s brought about yet another period of change and reinvention in Andy Warhol’s career. Following in the footsteps of proto-Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico whom he greatly admired, Warhol revisited his earlier body of works, producing revised versions of his most formidable Pop paintings for the latest Reversal/Retrospectives series.
Warhol also found renewed relevance and artistic rejuvenation through collaborations with emerging artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Perhaps due to the influence of their artistic styles of hand drawn lines and child-like scribbles, the most significant of Warhol’s late accomplishments became his return to hand painting. This return coincided with a religious thematic thrust to his work—an epic combination of developments that resulted in the monumental Last Supper series which would become Warhol’s final major body of work, one possessed of an uncanny gravitas in the wake of the artist’s early death in 1987.
Best remembered for his iconic multiples of pop culture figures and advertising imagery, it was little known (even to his inner circle of friends) that Warhol regularly attended mass at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on 5th Avenue and 90th Street in New York. The artist frequently volunteered to distribute food to the homeless, and even received Pope John Paul II’s personal blessing on April 1st, 1980 during a trip to Vatican City in Rome. By the mid 1980s Warhol’s work began to include sacred imagery, bringing it together with and juxtaposing it against an already established language of secular icons and capitalist logos.
This religious thrust was most notably seen in the works from his late blackand-white series of silkscreen prints. However, it was in the Last Supper series, commissioned by the well established Warhol patron Alexander Iolas, that Warhol’s previously unknown private religious interest would manifest itself most spectacularly in his art work: Warhol’s Last Supper series was to be installed across the street from Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic Last Supper fresco in Milan.
The present lot, Last Supper / Be a Somebody With a Body, is one of the most iconic images from this series. To create it, Warhol traced the projection of a detail from da Vinci’s schematic outline drawing onto canvas. This very technique was inspired by his collaboration with Basquiat in the early 1980s. In the present painting, Warhol’s traced outline of Christ is superimposed atop the heroic bust of a body builder, fusing religious imagery with pop culture. Never before in Warhol’s work have we seen such a striking parallel between two such disparate figures as in the Last Supper / Be a Somebody With a Body. Yet by placing them within the same canvas, Warhol comments on the elevation of pop culture to an almost religious status—the worshipping of images both sacred and profane.
In the present work, instead of appropriating figures and images from mass media, Warhol is appropriating his own imagery. He has painted Christ over his 1985 rendition of a body building advertisement with the slogan Be a Somebody with a Body. The text and the imagery undeniably emphasize physicality. The 1980s brought with it an obsessive narcissim and culture of fitness and physique. The new male ideal was sculpted, strong and powerful—the ultimate symbol of masculine beauty and sexual prowess. The bold outline of Christ over this image creates a hierarchical juxtaposition and challenges the concepts of physicality versus spirituality, of sexuality versus piety and of the holy versus the banal.
With this series, and this painting in particular, Warhol collides two of his greatest legacies—his personal piety and the secular power of images—with it, we are in many ways given  Warhol’s Last Will and Testament.