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 20^th 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, and Warhol’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 20^th 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.^v The 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.