Andy Warhol

The Estate of the Artist
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York
Gagosian Gallery, New York

Executed in 1973, Andy Warhol's Mao series signals a number of new departures in both subject and style, which incorporated a new political awareness with a new period of stylistic creativity. Although Warhol had broached the American political arena a decade earlier with his Electric Chair and Race Riots, both 1963, it was not until the Mao series that he engaged with the contentious international political concerns which were at the forefront of the global consciousness. Executed at a time when there was an optimistic thawing of Cold-war tensions between China and the United States and greater perspicuity in the West regarding the internal activities of the formerly closed Eastern regime, Warhol's depiction of the revolutionary Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party tapped into a press-fuelled American fascination with this burgeoning Oriental superpower. This unprecedented climate of political friendliness was epitomised by the 'ice-breaking' visit of Richard Nixon to China in 1972, in what the President termed ''the week that changed the world''.  The ostensibly apolitical Warhol decided to draw on this political happening to create one of his most powerful, and celebrated series.

First exhibited at the Musée Gallièra in Paris in 1974, the Mao series represents Warhol's first critically and commercially successful cycle following his premature 'retirement' from painting in order to devote himself entirely to film making in 1965.  After his near-fatal shooting in 1968 he entered a time of reflection and re-evaluation in his art and began making commissioned society portraits in the early 1970s. But the Mao series marked a significant stylistic turning point for Warhol, as Gregory Battcock noted in his review of the Paris show: ''In the new works the combinations of the splashy, expressionist elements with the precise silkscreen images almost tend to cancel one another out or, at least, refute the precision of the screens.'' (Gregory Battcock, 'Andy Warhol: New Predictions for Art' in Arts Magazine, May 1974, p. 35). Unlike his earlier flattened silkscreens, Mao is much more painterly in style with its loose brushwork of bright hand-painted acrylic hues. In a radical departure from the sombre tones of the original source photograph, the energetic emphases and bright hues of the paint seems more appropriate for a Hollywood star than a Communist leader. Warhol's irreverent attitude towards China's totalitarian leader is particularly clear in the present example with the dashes of green above the eyelids, and the red above the lips that suggest lipstick and eye-shadow, almost as cosmetic and glamorous as the Marilyns. There is a comic incongruity between the gravity and authority that the original portrait was intended to express and the resultant servility to bourgeois consumerism in Warhol's interpretation. In an ironic tour de force, Warhol, through the alchemy of his signature silkscreen technique, transforms the official portrait used for the propagandistic dissemination of Communism into a product of the Capitalist economy.

Moving seamlessly from mining celebrity and popular culture for his source images, Warhol's juxtaposition of the mythic, deified image of the Communist leader within an art form that fetishized consumerist objects is wonderfully subversive and shines like a beacon of genius within Warhol's oeuvre. Warhol's source image derives from an official portrait of the authoritarian ruler which followed the canon of official Soviet portraiture of Stalin and Lenin. Unlike the latter, however, Mao's image, which was seen to embody the revolutionary spirit of the masses, stares directly at the beholder and was exhibited prominently above the Tian'Anmen Gate where, in 1949, Mao had announced the founding of the People's Republic of China. Symbolising perpetual surveillance - the ever-watchful eye of the nanny state - the image was ubiquitous in every schoolroom, shop front and public institution across the country and was reproduced on the first page of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, more commonly known as Mao's 'Little Red Book', which was widely disseminated during and after the Cultural Revolution as a mandatory citizens' code. With a print-run estimated at over 2.2 billion, Mao's talismanic, stern yet benevolent face is one of the most extensively reproduced portraits in history.

It is not surprising that the image appealed to Warhol: ''I’ve been reading so much about China. They’re so nutty. They don't believe in creativity. The only picture they have is Mao Zedong. It's great. It looks like a silkscreen.'' (The artist cited in David Bourdon, Warhol, New York 1989, p. 317). In Mao, Warhol found a readymade icon which consecrated a cult of personality which Warhol equated with the mass marketing of celebrity endemic to his own consumer culture. With Mao, however, Warhol exposes the other side of public fame: political notoriety. While his earlier images of Marilyn Monroe sought to expose the power of the mass-media in canonising and commodifying figureheads of popular culture, here was an image which exposed the potency of the Chinese state-controlled propaganda machine to anoint and apotheosize a powerful political persona. This proved a fascinating and fertile dichotomy for Warhol: on the one hand the power of the Capitalist free-market paradigm, driven by the press and the mechanics of advertising, on the other, its direct antithesis, the Communist paradigm which sought absolute political and cultural control. In Mao, Warhol exposes the shared goals of both societal models: both consumerist advertising and the centrally controlled propaganda apparatus of the PRC commodify personality for the purpose of collective absorption.

The expressivity of the background adds a further touch of subversion, obliterating the dignity and clarity of the original authorless image. By treating Mao in his signature style, Warhol demotes him from a figure to be feared by American democratic ideals to an innocuous celebrity. Throughout the Cultural Revolution of the previous decade, Mao had all but extinguished popular culture and substituted himself in the place of the stars of stage and screen; here Warhol ironically completes the prophecy, by lavishing on him the same treatment bestowed on American icons of Pop.