“I was just reading in LIFE magazine that the most famous person in the world today is Chairman Mao.”
—Andy WarholAndy Warhol’s portraits of the Chinese leader Mao Zedong embody the sensational drives that fascinated Warhol throughout his career: fame and power. One of Warhol’s most iconic portraits, the artist began his large body of work centred on Mao following Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972. Warhol went on to create a total of 199 paintings in five scales as well as the series of ten screenprints. Returning to the vein of his earlier works, Warhol’s Mao compellingly transforms the infamous politico-cultural icon into one of his Pop images of celebrity and capitalist product.
The impetus for the work traces back to Warhol’s dealer, Bruno Bischofberger, who suggested that the artist paint the most important figure of the 20th century – which Bischofberger deduced must be Albert Einstein. Warhol characteristically shifted the emphasis from “important” to “famous”, responding “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?” Alike Warhol’s other portraits, from those of Marilyn Monroe to Vladimir Lenin, the Mao works further erode any sense of the individual beneath the public persona, encouraging viewers to see political leaders not only as ideological icons but also as celebrities, merely another embodiment of commercial mass culture.
“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 WarholFor his portraits, Warhol utilised the globally-known, official photograph of Mao Zedong, which was used for propagandic dissemination during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976), including on the cover of Mao’s “Little Red Book”. The portrait is one of the most reproduced images ever, with more than 840 million copies being printed from July 1966 to May 1967 alone. Ironically, while appropriating this mass-replicated image, Warhol nonetheless endowed his portraits with unique characteristics. Each portrait showcases Warhol’s painterly touch, as the leader’s face is framed by black squiggling gestural marks – a frenzy of movement against swaths of bold colour. This materialises Douglas Crimp’s perceptive statement from 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.”
