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Andy Warhol’s relationship with his mother Julia Warhola – who’s been described as ‘the passion of his life’ – was not just personal but also creative.

She’s been credited with influencing his aesthetic choices and drawing style and introducing him to the ‘business’ side of art.

During the Depression, she made little flower sculptures out of tin cans and coloured paper that she sold for pocket change, dragging her sons with her as she trawled door to door for customers. She also made traditional folk art, like decorated Easter eggs and embroideries for her church.

Devout Byzantine Catholics, the Warholas observed their Eastern European traditions. Warhol regularly attended mass throughout his life and often incorporated motifs from his religion and the gold of church decoration into his art.

In 1952, three years after Warhol moved to New York from Pittsburgh, Julia followed (Warhol’s father had died a decade earlier). She cooked for him and kept house for him, and they lived together until just before her death in 1972.

One day, so the story goes, Warhol needed some text for an assignment in a hurry and asked his mother to pen it for him in her own baroque and rather quirky handwriting. The client loved the spontaneous yet decorative result, and an important feature of Warhol’s commercial art was born: Julia’s calligraphy.

The pair went on to collaborate on lots of commercial projects, not least for leather-goods company Fleming-Joffe: Warhol adapted her script to create the company font.

Though it was still a novel innovation in graphic design, Warhol – always keen to speed up his production – later had his mother’s script made into Letraset, a dry-transfer lettering system.

In 1958 the Art Directors Club of New York awarded a certificate of merit to ‘Andy Warhol’s mother’, as she was always known, the collaboration an affectionately regarded open secret in the New York design world.

Warhol’s cover for the 1957 Moondog album, ‘The Story of Moondog’, which featured Julia’s text, won an award from the American Institute for Graphic Arts.