In 1989, the Baltimore Museum of Art deaccessioned Mark Rothko’s “Olive over Red” painting for $950,000 in order to purchase Andy Warhol’s “The Last Supper,” a bright yellow behemoth featuring two copies of Da Vinci’s historic fresco printed side by side. The late Warhol masterpiece, 35 feet long, hung on prominent display in the BMA’s contemporary wing for the better part of two decades.
Although Warhol may now seem to be another established white male artist ubiquitous in museums across the country, it is important to recall where American culture and politics stood when the BMA purchased this painting by an openly queer artist. In 1989, the United States government was blatantly hostile to LGBTQI citizens, AIDS was ravaging gay communities, and American soldiers were put in prison for the crime of homosexuality. The visibility of this one painting, and its subsequent display at the center of the museum’s Contemporary Wing for two decades, was an effort to balance previous institutional biases toward the heterosexual male gaze, embodied in Matisse’s famous female nudes and Gauguin’s “Woman with a Mango.”
At that time, the BMA’s chief curator was Brenda Richardson, a queer white woman, and her investment in Warhol’s “The Last Supper” was then the largest single purchase the museum had ever made at $682,000. The decision was controversial and said to have caused a rift with the collectors who had given the Rothko to the museum, but this purchase also led to a growing relationship with the Warhol Foundation, which helped the institution acquire over a dozen more paintings well below market rate, in order to have an expansive body of work by a prominent gay artist, a distinct minority in museum collections that continues today.
