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JON & ANDY '...I've got these desperate feelings that nothing means anything. And then I decide that I should try to fall in love, and that's what I'm doing now with Jon Gould, but then it's just too hard. I mean, you think about a person constantly and it's just a fantasy, it's not real, and then it gets so involved, you have to see them all the time and then it winds up that it's just a job like everything else, so I don't know. But Jon is a good person to be in love with because he has his own career, and I can develop movie ideas with him, you know? And maybe he can even convince Paramount to advertise in Interview, too. Right? So my crush on him will be good for business' (Andy Warhol, Thursday, April 16, 1981). Andy Warhol and Jon Gould were together between the years of 1981 and 1985 during which time Jon lived with Andy during his stays in New York. According to Bob Colacello, Warhol spent a good deal of time and effort winning over Jon's affection and was desperate for his attention and love. Indeed in Jon's presence Warhol was vulnerable in a way that deviated from the distant and mechanical persona he typically employed in his life as well as his work. Due to their closeness Jon was the recipient of many gifts from Warhol including the three works Mao of 1973, Oxidation of 1979 and the all-together unique Handprints of 1982. One of the most significant works gifted to Jon is Andy Warhol's Mao of 1973, from a series of intimate, 12 x 10 inch canvases famously executed by the artist from within his broad exploration of the Mao Zedong portrait. The Mao subject was first revealed in a series of works from 1972 that signified the artist's high-profile return to painting. In 1973, Warhol executed three subsequent series of Mao paintings distinguished by scale. While the screened portrait remained largely unchanged throughout these works, the dramatic use of colour and incorporation of highly gestural brushwork signalled a dramatic departure from his works of the 1960s as well as a marked personalisation of each canvas within this series. The image of Mao that Warhol used as a source for all his pictures of the Chinese leader was the portrait in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung, his famous "Little Red Book," of which Warhol owned a copy. For the artist so fascinated by popular culture, by stars and celebrities, this was the perfect subject matter. As he explained, 'I've been reading so much about China. They're so nutty. They don't believe in creativity. The only picture they ever have is of Mao Zedong. It's great. It looks like a silkscreen' (Warhol, quoted in D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1995, p. 317). The image of Mao, the Communist icon, presented an incredibly tempting target - its endemic nature in China meant that it already was Pop. Intriguingly, Mao shows the extent to which Warhol twisted and inverted what he had perceived as the Chinese lack of creativity. Mao and Warhol, in a sense, shared certain traits: an interest in the industrial, a focus on the gradual removal of individualism, and the paradoxical cult of personality that surrounded them. Warhol himself had been the recipient of similar accusations of crimes against creativity as those which he levelled against China when he controversially introduced his wholesale appropriation of press and publicity images to the world in the form of soup cans, pictures of Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe or car-crashes, silkscreened onto canvas with little intervention from the artist himself. But Mao and the other pictures from the 1973 series on this subject marked a bold new contrast: Warhol created this work himself, by hand, without assistants, and added painterly flourishes to the surface that conveyed an intriguing individuality, each work gaining its own distinct identity. Warhol had become famous for his almost automated picture-making process and statements declaring that he wished his works to look identical, calling his studio the Factory and making statements such as: 'The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do' (Warhol, quoted in ibid., p. 140). Warhol had deliberately tried to create art using industrial means suited to the age of manufacture and mass consumption. Yet now, in tackling the subject of a Communist leader who imposed conformity upon his nation with an iron rule, he broke free from these self-imposed limitations and created works that were emphatically gestural. In the present work, this dramatic departure in paint handling is especially evident in the broad, loose, almost improvisational brushstrokes. Warhol seems even to have boldly extracted from an area in the magenta paint using two fingers. He creates an intriguing juxtaposition between the brushwork, reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionism that had held sway in New York when Warhol had first entered into the fray of the art world, and the portrait rooted in the emphatically figurative Pop idiom that he had himself pioneered. At the same time, looking at the vigorous brushwork in Mao, the viewer cannot help but perceive what appears to be Warhol's exultation in applying paint to the canvas: the energy with which it has been applied seems to reflect his own joyous return to painting.

Andy Warhol (1928-1987)

Mao

Details

Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
Mao
signed and dated 'Andy Warhol 73' (on the overlap)
synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on linen
12 x 10in. (30.5 x 25.4cm.)
Painted in 1973

Provenance

Jon Gould, New York (a gift from the artist) and thence by descent to the present owner.

Literature

S. King-Nero and N. Printz (eds.), The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Sculptures, 1970-1974, vol. 03, New York 2010, no. 2439 (illustrated in color, pp. 247 and 261).

Exhibited

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Beuys and Warhol: The Artists as Shaman and Star, 1991-1992.
Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Andy Warhol: The Jon Gould Collection, 2004, no. 24.

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Mao

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