“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
Known as Warhol’s next prolific series after his Flowers of 1970, the Maos returned to the vein of the artist’s images of popular culture earlier in his career, while transforming the infamous politico-cultural icon into one of his Pop images of celebrity. One of Andy Warhol’s most iconic portraits, Mao captures the political and painterly consciousness that preoccupied the artist in the early 1970s. After Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972, Warhol undertook a body of Chairman Mao portraits between 1972 and 1973, creating a series of 10 screenprints and a total of 199 paintings in five scales. Transforming the globally known photograph of Mao Zedong used for propagandic dissemination during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976) into a pop mélange of capitalist product, Warhol’s series of Maos are nonetheless each endowed with unique characteristics. The series showcases Warhol’s painterly touch, the leader’s face framed by black squiggling gestural marks– a frenzy of movement against swaths of bold color, materializing 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.”i
First inspired by Nixon’s televised announcement in July 1971 on his sanctioned visit to China, Warhol’s Maos were conceived over a conversation between the artist and Bruno Bischofberger in 1972 as they were contemplating Warhol’s series of paintings of the same subject. On the genesis of the Mao series, as Bob Colacello recalled, “began with an idea from Bruno Bischofberger, who had been pushing Andy to go back to painting…Bruno’s idea was that Andy should paint the most important figure of the twentieth century.”ii At the time Warhol embarked on the series, the official photograph of the Chinese communist revolutionary was one of the most reproduced images around the world. Although Bischofberger had suggested Albert Einstein for his Theory of Relativity, Warhol replied, “That’s a good idea. 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 embodied the sensational drives that ultimately fascinated him. “Politics, after all, combines two of the themes that interested Andy most,” Colacello observed. “Power and fame.”iv
