'I wanted him to use Albert Einstein, but Warhol suggested Mao Tse Tung as he had recently read in the newspapers that Mao was the most famous living person' (Bruno Bischofsberger). The current lot is an important work of a complete set of 10 colour screenprints of Mao by Andy Warhol. The year of 1972 was an important year for the world; it was the year when President Nixon travelled to China for his controversial state visit to Chairman Mao Tse Tung in the hope to ease and re-open relationship between China and the USA, the East and the West. ‘The week that changed the world’, as President Nixon termed it, was widely covered by the media and the official state portrait of Mao could be seen everywhere, not only as part of Mao’s propaganda in China but also throughout the West; subsequently this portrait, printed in the Chairman’s Little Red Book became the world’s most famous image, a reproduction of an omni-present icon of political and cultural power. Having an alert eye for public consciousness, Warhol captured this historic moment as he knew it would be relevant for eternity. For Warhol, being fascinated by fame, Mao was an irresistible subject matter; he was particularly intrigued by the parallels between the proliferation of images in China - the country of propaganda and communism - and America - the country of mass-media and consumerism - as well as by the subsequent iconisation of the depicted persons. A similar interest for iconic imagery that made Warhol turn to symbols of popular culture in America, like movie stars, the Campbell’s Soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, made him interested in the ‘concept Mao’, whose photo he retrieved from a pre-existing popular image. The Mao series marked an important point in Andy Warhol’s career. He turned away from glamorous celebrities to more political themes and hereby contrasted the free American consumerist culture, supported by advertising and voyeuristic publicity, with the controlled propaganda machine of Communist China. In both countries images and portraits of famous people were distributed to a wide public conveying an artificial and idealist image of the depicted person. Mao, who suppressed and prosecuted intellectuals and artists and did not allow for anyone else to become famous, seems to have made himself into the Chinese equivalent of Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor in America. In Warhol’s Mao series, the statesman is represented as the ultimate icon who turned himself into the Communist counterpart of a Pop icon. While examining the concept of fame, Warhol is also looking at the powerful role of mass media and propaganda in the creation of a personality cult and the canonization of individuals. Not only marked the Mao series an important turning point in Warhol’s oeuvre with regards to subject matter, but he was also returning to fine arts after his almost fatal shooting in 1968 and the subsequent ‘retirement from painting’, regaining a period of renewed inspiration and productivity. The series also refocused on the concept of machine-like repetition of the image made possible by the screen-printing technique. The repetition of the Mao portrait could be viewed as a metaphor for the machinery of the media, whereas the suggested free and loose brushstrokes together with the many colours underline the artificiality behind the image and at the same time undermine the over-empowering feeling Mao aimed to achieve. This is contrasted with the desire of the viewer to look behind the sitter “and the consistently artificial constructions we accept and crave, granting them the status of something ‘real’. Moreover no matter how contrived or ‘artificial’ an image might be ‘originally’, Warhol grasped that it gained a powerful force in the category of ‘reality’ simply through its being adopted and circulated through an iconically obsessed culture” (H. Geldzahler and R. Rosenblum, ANDY WARHOL PORTRAITS OF THE SEVENTIES AND EIGHTIES, Thames & Hudson 1993, p.9). While Warhol manages to gently touch on political suggestions, he always shun from explicitly expressing any comments. ‘In Warhol’s hands, this image could be considered ominously and universally threatening, or a parody, or both’ (K. McShine, ANDY WARHOL: A RETROSPECTIVE, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p.19).