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Lot Essay
‘If Warhol can be regarded as an artist of strategy, his choice of Mao as a subject - as the ultimate star - was brilliant. The image of Mao taken from the portrait photograph reproduced in the Chairman’s so-called Little Red Book, is probably the one recognised by more of the earth’s population than any other - a ready-made icon representing absolute political and cultural power. In Warhol’s hands, this image could be considered ominously and universally threatening, or a parody or both’ (K. McShine, Andy Warhol Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 19).
Among the most powerful and enduring of all the artist’s images, Andy Warhol’s portraits of Chairman Mao now seem to stand like prophetic symbols of the end of the Cold War and of the strange marriage of Communism, Consumerism and Western Fashion that so distinguishes 21st Century China. Part icon, part portrait, part abstract expressionist painting, part Communist propaganda infused with disco kitsch, these extraordinary paintings mark both a comparatively rare Warholian incursion into the realm of political iconography and his very first experiments with a post-modernist approach to painting.
Hand-crafted with a thick swirling impasto of lurid colour over a sober silkscreened image of the implacable face of the Chinese leader, the two demonstrably painterly portraits offered here belong to the series of 12 x 10 inch portraits of Mao Zhedong that Warhol made between December 1972 and August 1973. The two works here, which have remained in the same collection ever since they were first bought from the Sonnabend Gallery, belong to the final series of portraits of Mao intended by Warhol to emulate and to counter the profusion, portability and repetition of Mao’s image in the Little Red Book. They are also the most heavily worked, experimental and painterly of all Warhol’s Mao pictures. As is the case in these two works where Warhol has added a deep green to the jacket of one and a mix of red oxide and dioxazine purple to the other after the screening process, it was in these works that Warhol first made full use of a new and deliberately inartistic painterly style. They are part of a group of works that effectively marked the artist’s return to the brush and to hand-crafted work as well as the beginning of a highly inventive and influential new period of post-modernist painting and production.
Warhol began to paint Mao in the spring of 1972 in the immediate aftermath of Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China. Largely preoccupied with his films, the running of his new magazine Interview and the establishment of what he described as ‘business art’ throughout the late 1960s and early ‘70s Warhol had, initially, to be encouraged back into painting by his European dealer Bruno Bischofberger and his assistant Fred Hughes. Bischofberger had suggested to Warhol that he paint a portrait of a major twentieth century figure such as Einstein. Warhol decided however upon Mao as soon as he realised that, in terms of numbers at least, Mao was undoubtedly the most famous person on the planet and a figure whose image had been reproduced more times than any other. In the wake of Nixon’s visit, Warhol had also become intrigued by the idea of Mao suddenly being ‘in fashion’ and by how he might be able to subsume the image of this Communist idol to his own notion of ‘business art’. ‘Since fashion is art now and Chinese is in fashion’, he said at the time, ‘I could make a lot of money. Mao would be really nutty… not to believe in it, it’d just be fashion…but the same portrait you can buy in the poster store’ (A. Warhol, quoted in D. Bourdon, Andy Warhol, New York 1989, p. 317). As a result of this thinking, Warhol’s original idea was not to ‘do anything’, just to ‘print up’ the image [that one can buy in the poster store] ‘on canvas’ (A. Warhol, quoted in D. Bourdon, Andy Warhol, New York 1989, p. 317). But, he soon afterwards became fascinated by both the visual and conceptual possibilities offered by the clash of Communist propaganda imagery and Western fashion kitsch. In a progressive sequence of images of Mao taken from the American edition of the ‘Little Red Book’, he then increasingly glammed up this iconic image, seemingly translating this powerful, mysterious, and to American eyes, strangely alien and threatening image of Communist propaganda into a glamourised 1970s pop idol reminiscent of his own celebrity portraits. The iconoclasm of this approach and the apparent clashing of two very different cultures within one single image - something typical of so much of Warhol’s art in general - was such that it ultimately opened up a new world of painterly possibility that Warhol was consequently to pursue throughout much of the 1970s, from the ensuing fetishism of the Hammer and Sickles and the Guns, to the playful pseudo-abstraction of his Shadows and Camouflage paintings.
Between the spring of 1972 and the summer of 1973 Warhol conceived his Mao series based on the colour photograph of the Chinese leader that appeared as the frontispiece of the American edition of his ‘Little Red Book’ or The Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. Warhol had established the format and style for this series in a sequence of eleven 2m-high works that he made in the spring of 1972 soon after the Nixon visit. Towards the end of the year he then made another four giant paintings of Mao - the largest single-image works of his career - that stood at over four meters high and which would, he hoped approximate the vast (though actually different) single image of Mao that still hangs today from Tiananmen Gate in Beijing. Maos from 1972 some of which are held in collections such as Dia Art Foundation, New York, the Saatchi Collection, London and the collection of Peter Brant, Greenwich, in the main, all followed the format of the original source photograph fairly closely, maintaining its grey-blue background and using naturalistic skin colouring. In the four giant Mao paintings there are traces in some of a deliberately humorous and iconoclastic cosmetic enhancement of the Chairman’s face, using colours that hint at rouge and lipstick. But this apparent ‘slapping up’ or ‘camping up’ of the famous Chinese icon is slight in comparison with some of the extremely painterly disco-glamour enhancements that Warhol applied to his further series of Maos in 1973.
In contrast to the fifteen Mao paintings he made in 1972, Warhol deliberately made his 1973 Maos all unique and clearly individual works, distinguishing each of them from the others by using a wide range of different colours and a demonstrably textural and highly painterly style that brilliantly and humorously evoked a sense of painterliness or what the French call ‘peinture’. His final series of 12x10 Maos of which the present lot is a part of is perhaps some of the most painterly, a final flourish for this iconic series. ‘I’ve been reading so much about China’ Warhol said. ‘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’ (A. Warhol, quoted in D. Bourdon, Andy Warhol, New York 1989, p. 317). Exploring a paradoxical sense of unity and diversity in these works by colouring each uniform image differently, Warhol has, in this series, also deliberately chosen to employ a demonstrably exaggerated play of brushwork that runs directly against the flat, mechanical, photographic image of his subject.
Indeed, Warhol has used a deliberately sumptuous and also slapdash approach to painting that he once described as his ‘just be sloppy and fast’ method. His aim, he said, was to emulate in paint the way that Julia Childs - presenter of the TV programme The French Chef - cooks. Here, in these two 12 x 10 inch examples, this seemingly nonchalant but also clever post-modernist take on the lofty tradition of ‘peinture’, has been deliberately applied to the Mao images to humorously assert the supposed genius and individuality of the artist’s hand and project a sense of the uniqueness and colourful desirability of the art object onto each work. These, highly marketable qualities, so admired by the Western art world with its cult of the individual genius, are all, of course, ones that stand at complete odds with the Mao’s subject-matter and the solemn, penetrative gaze of the authoritarian icon of uniformity and Collectivism that they depict.
It is this fascinating Warholian fusion of East and West in these works - the apparently wry subsuming of two seemingly opposed political ideologies to the playful and superficial worlds of Pop and fashion, that endows Warhol’s Mao portraits with the prophetic qualities they have today. Seeming to anticipate the Coca-Cola-drinking images of Mao that so distinguished the Chinese Pop art of the 1990s along with much of the stereotypical images of modern China today, Warhol’s radiant disco-coloured Maos now serve as powerful icons of today’s brave new world of globalised art markets and economies where all ideology seems subservient to the power of the consumer. In his 1975 book outlining his philosophy and vision of ‘business art’, Warhol had written, provocatively but also presciently, that ‘the most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s, the most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s, the most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s’ but that, ‘Peking and Moscow don’t have anything beautiful yet’ (A. Warhol, From A to B and Back Again, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, New York 1975, p. 71).
Among the most powerful and enduring of all the artist’s images, Andy Warhol’s portraits of Chairman Mao now seem to stand like prophetic symbols of the end of the Cold War and of the strange marriage of Communism, Consumerism and Western Fashion that so distinguishes 21st Century China. Part icon, part portrait, part abstract expressionist painting, part Communist propaganda infused with disco kitsch, these extraordinary paintings mark both a comparatively rare Warholian incursion into the realm of political iconography and his very first experiments with a post-modernist approach to painting.
Hand-crafted with a thick swirling impasto of lurid colour over a sober silkscreened image of the implacable face of the Chinese leader, the two demonstrably painterly portraits offered here belong to the series of 12 x 10 inch portraits of Mao Zhedong that Warhol made between December 1972 and August 1973. The two works here, which have remained in the same collection ever since they were first bought from the Sonnabend Gallery, belong to the final series of portraits of Mao intended by Warhol to emulate and to counter the profusion, portability and repetition of Mao’s image in the Little Red Book. They are also the most heavily worked, experimental and painterly of all Warhol’s Mao pictures. As is the case in these two works where Warhol has added a deep green to the jacket of one and a mix of red oxide and dioxazine purple to the other after the screening process, it was in these works that Warhol first made full use of a new and deliberately inartistic painterly style. They are part of a group of works that effectively marked the artist’s return to the brush and to hand-crafted work as well as the beginning of a highly inventive and influential new period of post-modernist painting and production.
Warhol began to paint Mao in the spring of 1972 in the immediate aftermath of Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China. Largely preoccupied with his films, the running of his new magazine Interview and the establishment of what he described as ‘business art’ throughout the late 1960s and early ‘70s Warhol had, initially, to be encouraged back into painting by his European dealer Bruno Bischofberger and his assistant Fred Hughes. Bischofberger had suggested to Warhol that he paint a portrait of a major twentieth century figure such as Einstein. Warhol decided however upon Mao as soon as he realised that, in terms of numbers at least, Mao was undoubtedly the most famous person on the planet and a figure whose image had been reproduced more times than any other. In the wake of Nixon’s visit, Warhol had also become intrigued by the idea of Mao suddenly being ‘in fashion’ and by how he might be able to subsume the image of this Communist idol to his own notion of ‘business art’. ‘Since fashion is art now and Chinese is in fashion’, he said at the time, ‘I could make a lot of money. Mao would be really nutty… not to believe in it, it’d just be fashion…but the same portrait you can buy in the poster store’ (A. Warhol, quoted in D. Bourdon, Andy Warhol, New York 1989, p. 317). As a result of this thinking, Warhol’s original idea was not to ‘do anything’, just to ‘print up’ the image [that one can buy in the poster store] ‘on canvas’ (A. Warhol, quoted in D. Bourdon, Andy Warhol, New York 1989, p. 317). But, he soon afterwards became fascinated by both the visual and conceptual possibilities offered by the clash of Communist propaganda imagery and Western fashion kitsch. In a progressive sequence of images of Mao taken from the American edition of the ‘Little Red Book’, he then increasingly glammed up this iconic image, seemingly translating this powerful, mysterious, and to American eyes, strangely alien and threatening image of Communist propaganda into a glamourised 1970s pop idol reminiscent of his own celebrity portraits. The iconoclasm of this approach and the apparent clashing of two very different cultures within one single image - something typical of so much of Warhol’s art in general - was such that it ultimately opened up a new world of painterly possibility that Warhol was consequently to pursue throughout much of the 1970s, from the ensuing fetishism of the Hammer and Sickles and the Guns, to the playful pseudo-abstraction of his Shadows and Camouflage paintings.
Between the spring of 1972 and the summer of 1973 Warhol conceived his Mao series based on the colour photograph of the Chinese leader that appeared as the frontispiece of the American edition of his ‘Little Red Book’ or The Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. Warhol had established the format and style for this series in a sequence of eleven 2m-high works that he made in the spring of 1972 soon after the Nixon visit. Towards the end of the year he then made another four giant paintings of Mao - the largest single-image works of his career - that stood at over four meters high and which would, he hoped approximate the vast (though actually different) single image of Mao that still hangs today from Tiananmen Gate in Beijing. Maos from 1972 some of which are held in collections such as Dia Art Foundation, New York, the Saatchi Collection, London and the collection of Peter Brant, Greenwich, in the main, all followed the format of the original source photograph fairly closely, maintaining its grey-blue background and using naturalistic skin colouring. In the four giant Mao paintings there are traces in some of a deliberately humorous and iconoclastic cosmetic enhancement of the Chairman’s face, using colours that hint at rouge and lipstick. But this apparent ‘slapping up’ or ‘camping up’ of the famous Chinese icon is slight in comparison with some of the extremely painterly disco-glamour enhancements that Warhol applied to his further series of Maos in 1973.
In contrast to the fifteen Mao paintings he made in 1972, Warhol deliberately made his 1973 Maos all unique and clearly individual works, distinguishing each of them from the others by using a wide range of different colours and a demonstrably textural and highly painterly style that brilliantly and humorously evoked a sense of painterliness or what the French call ‘peinture’. His final series of 12x10 Maos of which the present lot is a part of is perhaps some of the most painterly, a final flourish for this iconic series. ‘I’ve been reading so much about China’ Warhol said. ‘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’ (A. Warhol, quoted in D. Bourdon, Andy Warhol, New York 1989, p. 317). Exploring a paradoxical sense of unity and diversity in these works by colouring each uniform image differently, Warhol has, in this series, also deliberately chosen to employ a demonstrably exaggerated play of brushwork that runs directly against the flat, mechanical, photographic image of his subject.
Indeed, Warhol has used a deliberately sumptuous and also slapdash approach to painting that he once described as his ‘just be sloppy and fast’ method. His aim, he said, was to emulate in paint the way that Julia Childs - presenter of the TV programme The French Chef - cooks. Here, in these two 12 x 10 inch examples, this seemingly nonchalant but also clever post-modernist take on the lofty tradition of ‘peinture’, has been deliberately applied to the Mao images to humorously assert the supposed genius and individuality of the artist’s hand and project a sense of the uniqueness and colourful desirability of the art object onto each work. These, highly marketable qualities, so admired by the Western art world with its cult of the individual genius, are all, of course, ones that stand at complete odds with the Mao’s subject-matter and the solemn, penetrative gaze of the authoritarian icon of uniformity and Collectivism that they depict.
It is this fascinating Warholian fusion of East and West in these works - the apparently wry subsuming of two seemingly opposed political ideologies to the playful and superficial worlds of Pop and fashion, that endows Warhol’s Mao portraits with the prophetic qualities they have today. Seeming to anticipate the Coca-Cola-drinking images of Mao that so distinguished the Chinese Pop art of the 1990s along with much of the stereotypical images of modern China today, Warhol’s radiant disco-coloured Maos now serve as powerful icons of today’s brave new world of globalised art markets and economies where all ideology seems subservient to the power of the consumer. In his 1975 book outlining his philosophy and vision of ‘business art’, Warhol had written, provocatively but also presciently, that ‘the most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s, the most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s, the most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s’ but that, ‘Peking and Moscow don’t have anything beautiful yet’ (A. Warhol, From A to B and Back Again, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, New York 1975, p. 71).