Andy Warhol

Collection of John and Kimiko Powers, Carbondale
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in August 2001

New York, Gagosian Gallery, Pop Art. The John and Kimiko Powers Collection, April - June 2001 

This work is in very good condition. There is a faint evidence of soiling and few scattered unobtrusive paper abrasions. Framed under Plexiglas.
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 "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." Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol's delicately executed Mao, 1973 is a beautifully hand crafted example of one of the artist's finest drawings.  Immortalizing this iconic persona, Mao is presented front-facing and strong-willed, directly confronting the viewer in a familiar pose.  Warhol's Mao derives from a source image taken from an official portrait of the authoritarian ruler which followed the canon of official Soviet portraiture of Stalin and Lenin.  Mao's image, which was seen to embody the revolutionary spirit of the masses, was first exhibited in a prominent position above the Tian'Anmen Gate where, in 1949, Mao had announced the founding of the People's Republic of China. Symbolising perpetual surveillance and 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, this made Mao's stern yet benevolent face one of the most extensively reproduced portraits in history.

The present work is a unique version of this renowned figure in that it is hand drawn with great care and reveals immaculate precision and individual detail.  The silkscreen paintings of Mao depict the same image but are products of his factory, a mass produced commodity.  Here, the drawing of Mao has a special intimate link with Warhol and exposes a more personal side of the artist.  Warhol's drawing of Mao is strong example of his superb aptitude as a draftsman and his incredible technical skill, talents which are often not immediately recognized in his oeuvre.  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. 

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. 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, 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.