Mao

Arriving in a vision of flaming, calligraphic colour, Andy Warhol’s Mao (1973) stems from one of the most important series of the artist’s career. Mao Zedong is screenprinted in black ink against a brilliant backdrop of cadmium yellow, heightened with swirling, marbled strokes of bright red. A vivid mauve impasto adorns the dictator’s jacket. Announcing his triumphant return to painting after a four-year hiatus, the Mao works saw Warhol restage a figure he called ‘the most famous person in the world’—his chosen image was an official portrait from the frontispiece to Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ of quotations, which he knew was owned by a billion people at the time—as a dazzling Pop spectacle. They represented the first major new series for Warhol since his Flowers of 1964, and, with their rich painterly surfaces, heralded a lush new direction for his practice. The present example was included in Warhol’s seminal exhibition of Mao works at the Musée Galliera, Paris, in 1974, and has been unseen in public since. Warhol dedicated the work on its reverse to Vincent Fremont. A key Factory associate, Fremont grew to be one of Warhol’s closest confidants, eventually becoming his studio manager and the Vice President of Andy Warhol Enterprises, and, following the artist’s death in 1987, a founding director of the Andy Warhol Foundation.

After his shooting by Valerie Solanas in June 1968, Warhol’s painterly output had seen a rapid decline, with only a handful of commissioned portraits dating from that time until the start of 1972. The dealer Bruno Bischofberger, trying to push him back into painting, suggested taking on a grand, ambitious new subject: the most important figure of the twentieth century. Bischofberger proposed Albert Einstein. ‘That’s a good idea’, Warhol replied, ‘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?’ (A. Warhol, quoted in B. Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Up Close, New York 1990, p. 111). The Life cover story Warhol was reading, published on 3 March 1972, detailed US President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China the previous month: an important diplomatic overture that marked a thaw in Sino-American relations. Warhol swiftly identified Mao as a readymade icon. His portrait and uniform—always the same, as reliable as the Coca-Cola logo—were a brand identity, paraded in rallies throughout China, and mass-produced, homogenised and repeated like a silkscreen across global political culture. ‘Mao would be really nutty’, he said of the subject, ‘... not to believe in it, it’d just be in fashion’ (A. Warhol, quoted in D. Bourdon, Andy Warhol, New York 1989, p. 317). This deadpan focus on Mao’s fame as a flat image, emptied of political meaning, belied a typically Warholian irony: he was well aware that for many Americans Mao’s face symbolised an alien, threatening ideology, and that repackaging one of capitalism’s chief antagonists as a Pop commodity would give the works a perverse appeal to his collectors. In 1982 Warhol would himself travel to China, visiting the Great Wall and posing in front of Mao’s monumental portrait in Tiananmen Square.

After an initial group of Mao paintings created in early 1972, Warhol went on to produce the series on five discrete scales, following the logic of his Flowers of the previous decade: they would range from the 12” x 10” format of the present work up to ‘giant’ versions more than four metres high. It is in the jewel-like smaller canvases that Warhol’s newly exuberant brushwork comes to the fore. Their scale amplifies the impact of his freehand flourishes of wet-on-wet paint, which fuse the screenprinted impression to the painted field and, in some cases, partly consume Mao’s image. Echoing Abstract Expressionism where his earlier works had tended towards a more hard-edged, mechanical aesthetic, Warhol invigorated his hybrid silkscreen-painting medium with previously unseen dramas of touch and gesture. Across the series, Mao’s countenance shifts as Warhol’s brush heightens or occludes different aspects of the portrait. The present example haloes the Chairman’s head and mouth in glowing daubs of red, recalling the off-register makeup of the iconic Marilyns of the 1960s.

In the Musée Galliera show, which opened in February 1974, the present work was installed with forty-one other canvases in an abutted frieze that ran around the wall, creating a vivid pageant of serial colour. Recapitulating the idea of the Cow wallpaper which he had first used at Castelli Gallery in 1966, Warhol had also covered the exhibition space with a new wallpaper based on his drawing of Mao’s portrait: pasted at staggered heights, this profusion of floating purple heads multiplied and reverberated among the paintings on display. Along with a second forty-two-canvas frieze and fifteen larger Mao paintings, the wallpaper brought the total crowd of Mao faces in the show to almost two thousand, creating an immersive, even overwhelming visual environment. At once parodic and exuberant, dancing between sharp social commentary and the pure glamour of fame as surface, the show made for a sensational, totalising expression of Warhol’s double-edged Pop genius: with its vibrant colour and its subject’s inscrutable gaze, the present Mao exemplifies the series’ enduring, enigmatic power.