“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
Andy Warhol’s portraits of the Chinese leader Mao Zedong embody the sensational drives that ultimately fascinated Warhol throughout his career: fame and power. 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. Returning to the vein of his earlier works, Warhol’s Mao transforms the infamous politico-cultural icon into one of his Pop images of celebrity and capitalist product.
Warhol utilised the globally-known, official photograph of Mao Zedong that 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 just from July 1966 to May 1967. Nonetheless, Warhol’s Mao portraits are 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 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.”
“I was just reading in LIFE magazine that the most famous person in the world today is Chairman Mao.”
—Andy Warhol
Warhol’s Maos were conceived following the suggestion of his dealer Bruno Bischofberger that he should 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 portraits further erode any sense of the individual beneath the public persona, encouraging viewers to see these political leaders not only as ideological icons but also as celebrities, merely another embodiment of commercial mass culture.
