Andy Warhol’s Mao, 1973, reinterprets the iconic government portrait of Chairman Mao as a black silkscreen likeness in a sea of bright blues and green. The Mao series marks a stylistic shift in Warhol’s career, as he returns to his trademark silkscreen technique for the first prolific series since his Flowers of 1964, but with a more expressive, painterly flair. The effect of Warhol’s latest innovation was immediately apparent upon the exhibition of Mao paintings at the Musée Galliera, Paris, in 1974, as Gregory Battcock observed: “In the new works the combinations of the splashy, expressionist elements with the precise silkscreen images almost tend to cancel one another out or, at least, refute the precision of the screens.”i Inspired by the ubiquity of Chairman Mao’s portrait in China during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, and the ultimate fame and power it represented, Mao remakes the Chairman in Warhol’s own style.
Westerners like Warhol were exposed to Mao’s image in part thanks to Richard Nixon’s 1972 diplomatic visit to China, which reopened political and cultural exchange between two nations on either side of the Cold War divide. Bob Colacello, former editor of Interview, and frequent Factory visitor, recalled that Warhol and his gallerist, Bruno Bischofberger, had been discussing the artist’s return to silkscreen for some time in the early 1970s. “Bruno’s idea was that Andy should paint the most important figure of the 20th century,” Colacello said, and Bischofberger suggested Albert Einstein as a subject.ii “That’s a good idea,” Warhol responded, “but I was just reading in Life magazine that the most famous person in the world today is Chairman Mao. Shouldn’t it be the most famous person, Bruno?”iii For Warhol, the Chinese leader represented the cultural sensations that ultimately fascinated him. “Politics, after all, combines two of the themes that interested Andy most,” Colacello said. “Power and fame.”iv
“If Warhol can be regarded as an artist of strategy, his choice of Mao as a subject—as the ultimate star—was brilliant… In Warhol’s hands, this image could be considered ominously and universally threatening, or a parody, or both.”
—Kynaston McShine
Warhol completed 199 portraits of Chairman Mao between 1972 and 1973, at five different scales. Works of the same scaled series as the present work reside in a number of prestigious public and private collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Andy Warhol Musuem, Pittsburgh, and the Brant and Hall Art Foundations, among others.The present work belongs to the smallest of the series, its size recalling the portability and ubiquity of the Chairman’s portrait in the Little Red Book, a collection of the political leader’s quotations, andWarhol’s original source for the iconic image. The Chairman’s portrait in The Little Red Book, reproduced at scale in public spaces across China such as Tiananmen Square, Beijing, as well, was perhaps the most widely-reproduced image of the 20th century, if not all of history. The image proliferated with particular rapidity during China’s Cultural Revolution; according to The Peking Review, revolutionary workers printed more than 840 million portraits from July 1966 to May 1967 alone.vThe Little Red Book itself, produced for dissemination in the Cultural Revolution, had a print run estimated over at least one billion.vi Chairman Mao’s likeness was nothing short of ubiquitous, and this absolute representation of political and cultural power surely grabbed Warhol’s attention.
“I have been reading so much about China… The only picture they ever have is of Mao Zedong. It’s great. It looks like a silkscreen.”
—Andy Warhol
With Mao, however, Warhol is not merely reproducing the Chinese leader, but reinterpreting his likeness in his own visual idiom. As Douglas Crimp said in 1973, “[Warhol] has given us an image of Mao with such brutal force that, however we formulated our mental picture of the Chinese leader a moment ago, he has supplanted it with his own.” vii In the present work, typical to the Mao series, Warhol’s application of colors approximates the basic forms of the portrait: green face, cerulean background, and dark blue shoulders. For the first time in his career, however, Warhol leaves behind the mechanical flatness of the silkscreened surface, opting instead for energetic brushstrokes, thick with impasto, the component colors of each painted area still visible in the white-streaked, wavy line of cerulean up the side of the portrait, for instance, or the yellow in the swath of green that highlights the Chairman’s lips. This painterly playfulness undercuts any political self-seriousness in Warhol’s Mao. The Chinese Chairman is like any of Warhol’s other famous subjects: a cultural icon open to artistic interpretation.
i Gregory Battcock, “Andy Warhol: New Predictions for Art,” Arts Magazine, vol. 48, May 1974, p. 35.
ii Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Up Close, New York, 1990, p. 110-111.
iii Ibid.
iv Ibid.
v Billie Anania, “Warhol’s Mao Turns Fifty,” Art in America, Apr. 28, 2022, online.
vi Alexander C. Cook, Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, 2014, p. xiii; Daniel Leese, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution, 2013, p. 108.
vii Douglas Crimp, “New York Letter,” Art International, vol. 17, no. 2, Feb. 1973, p. 46.
Provenance
Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Sonnabend Gallery, Paris Attilio Codognato, Venice Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta, Milano Christie’s, London, June 24, 2004, lot 5 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Exhibited
Naples, Maschio Angioino (p. 87, illustrated); Turin, Museo dell’Automobile Carlo Biscaretti di Ruffia (p. 91, illustrated); Rome, Chiostro del Bramante (p. 91, illustrated), Warhol - Viaggio in Italia, July 20, 1996–June 20, 1997 Mänttä, Serlachius Museum Gösta, SuperPop!, June 14–September 14, 2014, p. 194 (illustrated, p. 195)
Literature
Neil Printz and Sally King-Nero, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Sculptures, 1970-1974, Vol. 03, New York, 2010, no. 2425, pp. 260, 545 (illustrated, p. 242)
Andy Warhol was the leading exponent of the Pop Art movement in the U.S. in the 1960s. Following an early career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol achieved fame with his revolutionary series of silkscreened prints and paintings of familiar objects, such as Campbell's soup tins, and celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe. Obsessed with popular culture, celebrity and advertising, Warhol created his slick, seemingly mass-produced images of everyday subject matter from his famed Factory studio in New York City. His use of mechanical methods of reproduction, notably the commercial technique of silk screening, wholly revolutionized art-making.
Working as an artist, but also director and producer, Warhol produced a number of avant-garde films in addition to managing the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founding Interview magazine. A central figure in the New York art scene until his untimely death in 1987, Warhol was notably also a mentor to such artists as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
signed and dated “Andy Warhol 73” and stamped by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc. and numbered “A012.089” on the overlap acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen 12 x 10 in. (30.5 x 25.4 cm) Executed in 1973.