Andy Warhol - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist; Marvin Ross Friedman & Company, Miami; Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Andy Warhol’s portraits of Chairman Mao are the most paradoxical ofmodern masterworks. Television coverage of Nixon’s historic trip to Chinain 1972 exposed the artist to the world’s most famous political image. Inlove with fame, Warhol fearlessly placed Mao’s smiling, seemingly benignface at the very core of a stunning, original body of painting,” (R. Mnuchin,D. Lévy, Andy Warhol: Mao, NewYork, 2006).The beginning of the 1970s was a transitional period in the storied career ofAndy Warhol. His rise to fame in the 1960s saw him redefine the Americanavant-garde, upending the seriousness of high-Modernism with a rash ofbold colors, graphic imagery, repetition, groundbreaking experimental films,irony, and an unabashed celebration of capitalism, consumer culture, andthe entrepreneurial ethos. By the late 1960s, however, Warhol’s star hadrisen about as high as seemed possible, and art world critics and curators,eager to discover the next big thing, became less enthusiastic about hiswork. Still reeling from the near-fatal gunshot wound delivered on June 3,1968 by Valerie Solanas, as the 1970s began a delicate Warhol found that hisavant-garde credibility had expired—he had become a victim of his ownsuccess with no clear path to take.The 1970s, however, would see Warhol successfully make the leap fromavant-garde darling to the most influential society portraitist of hisgeneration, thanks in no small part to his inspired choice for anuncommissioned portrait—the massively influential Chinese revolutionaryleader Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. In 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon’shistoric trip to China to repair twenty-two years of animosity between thetwo countries thrust Mao—whose Quotations from Chairman Mao (TheLittle Red Book) was already the second best-seller only to the Bible—intothe U.S. media spotlight. Warhol’s stated goal in producing the Mao series,which consisted of thousands of paintings, prints, and wallpaperinstallations, was to obtain the Chairman’s patronage in the hopes that anofficial mandate from Mao would result in an endless supply of revenue inthe form of commissioned portraits for every government office, school andpublic venue in China. While the communist revolutionary did not, ofcourse, elect to do business with the foremost purveyor of Americancapitalist imagery, the success of the Mao portraits did spark a renewedinterest in Warhol in his new role as portrait artist; he would go on toproduce thousands of commissioned portraits of almost every noteworthyAmerican icon of the period.Most notable about the Mao series, including the present lot, from a stylisticstandpoint is Warhol’s use of visible, expressionistic brushwork over hisstandard off-register silkscreen technique and bright Pop colors.Thepresent lot, for example, renders the Chairman’s face in a neon orange,suspending it over a swirling cloud of blue and white, the brush-marks moreclearly visible than ever before. While Warhol’s early paintings andsilkscreen works presented an impenetrable façade of flat coolness and anpurposefully opaque intentionality as antidote to the emotive and expressivebrushstrokes of the Abstract Expressionist movement that Pop succeeded,for his Mao series Warhol revived the expressionist aesthetic with the intentof having it express nothing. Ever the ironist, Warhol was quoted asdeclaring that “The ‘hand-painted look’ was now in fashion,” (N. Hiromoto,“Andy Warhol: Conditions of Art,” Andy Warhol, Tokyo, 2000), reducing theentrenched connection between personal vision and painterly gesture thatwas a basic tenet of Abstract Expressionism to a “look” that could beapplied to a painting as a decorative motif absent of any deeper symbolism.Whether or not the painters of the previous generation appreciated theappropriation—to say nothing of Chairman Mao’s feelings about havingbeen immortalized by the most quintessentially Western of artists—wasbeside the point: with Mao, Warhol stamped one more indelible image ontothe American consciousness and in the process breathed a second windback into his career as the ne plus ultra of portraiture.

  • Artist Biography

    Andy Warhol

    American • 1928 - 1987

    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.

     

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44

Mao

1974
Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas.
12 1/8 x 10 1/8 in. (30.8 x 25.7 cm).
Signed and dated “Andy Warhol 74” and stamped with the Authentication Board seal and numbered “A108.042” on the overlap

Estimate
$700,000 - 900,000 

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York