Andy Warhol

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC1059)
Knoedler & Company, New York
Sale: Sotheby's Parke-Bernet, New York, 22 March 1979, Lot 106
Private Collection, Sweden
Sale: Christie's, London, Contemporary Art, 27 October 1994, Lot 119
Mugrabi Collection
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art, 21 October 1999, Lot 33
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Paris, Musée Galliera, Andy Warhol: Mao, 1974
Lausanne, Fondation de l'Hermitage; Milan, Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta; Ludwigshafen, Wilhelm-Hack Museum; Helsinki, Kunsthalle; Warsaw, National Museum; Krakow, National Museum, Andy Warhol, 1995-98, no. 83, illustrated in colour

Neil Printz and Sally King-Nero, Eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculpture 1970-1974, Volume 3, New York 2010, p. 239, no. 2417, illustrated in colour  

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant, the yellow tones of the face are slightly warmer, and the illustration fails to convey the lustrous nature of the surface in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some extremely minor and intermittent frame rubbing in a very few places to the edges and bottom corners. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

"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

 

Executed in 1973, Andy Warhol's Mao series signals a number of new departures in both subject and style, evincing an astute political awareness and heralding the dawn of a new period of stylistic creativity. Singularly defining this illustrious corpus, the present Mao is the perfect archetype and, with ideal colour and composition achieved through faultless execution, makes it possibly the best small silkscreen of Mao by the artist. 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 present work that he engaged with the contentious international political concerns which were at the forefront of the global consciousness. Allied with this political awakening, Warhol's treatment of the present work in a newly expressionistic hand set the precedent for his latter oeuvre. 

 

Warhol starts by broadly brushing skeins of paint onto a length of canvas, in places dragging his fingers over the paint while still wet to create a surprisingly varied and gestural ground anathema to the insistently flat surfaces of his 1960s canvases. With this brushy style, the coloured ground corresponds to the silk-screened image with different coloured zones being demarcated for the face, the jacket and the background. In an ironic nod in the direction of his Abstract Expressionist forefathers, this lushly drippy surface in which we feel the physical presence of the artist bears no relation to the superimposed silkscreen image and is subversively drained of meaning. Liberating it from its loaded Abstract Expressionist associations, Warhol breathes new life into the brushstroke and in the present work we are left to simply admire the sumptuous, coalescing ripples of pigment. Set against this glossy, richly textured acrylic ground, Warhol screens the infamous image of Mao. The lustrous black silkscreen ink clings to the ridges of acrylic under-painting to create a uniform, unbroken and delicate aesthetic unity.

 

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. 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 an Orwellian Big Brother - 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.

 

In Mao, therefore, 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 tabloid press and the mechanics of advertising, on the other, its direct antithesis, the Communist paradigm which sought absolute political and cultural control by the same means. 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. In a subversive tour de force, Warhol transforms the official portrait used for the dissemination of Communism into a commodity of the Capitalist economy, no more consequential than a can of soup or box of Brillo.

 

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 at the time 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 ineluctably flat silkscreen paintings, Mao is much more painterly in style with its loose brushwork of bright hand-painted acrylic hues. This is abundantly clear in the present example. In a radical departure from the sombre tones of the original source photograph, here the peachy fleshtones are set against a bright lemon yellow and velvety swathe of deep purple - more redolent of papal vestments than Mao's utilitarian Communist attire. The expressivity of the background, with its energetic emphases and bright hues, 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.

From one artist to another: José María Cano and Warhol's Mao 1973

 

For more than a decade, the present work has held a highly significant position in the personal collection of the artist José María Cano. Cano is a specialist in painting portraits. His ironic portraits of the financial world WS100 have been internationally acclaimed. His critically lauded work has been exhibited around the world from the Venice Biennale to the opening show of the DOX museum, and alongside the works of Goya and Picasso at the Picasso Foundation in Malaga, and is permanently held in prestigious collections from Taiwan to Prague to New York. From one artist to another, Andy Warhol's Mao has served as singular object of contemplation and inspiration for the Spanish painter, directly catalysing Cano's creativity and precipitating a series of self-portraits that have become of paramount importance within his own oeuvre.

 

"Size matters in real art. Art often works like the formula of pressure. Pressure is strength divided by area. P = F/ A where: P is pressure; F is force; and A is area. So pressure is inversely proportional to surface. With the same amount of force, a smaller surface will generate a harder effect. That was understood by many painters in art history since Hieronymus Bosch to our days. In more recent art, artists like Paul Klee, Malevich or Dalí are very remarkable examples. For me Warhol is the best example in contemporary art. The smaller a Warhol is, the strongest it impacts me. This Mao looks like a self-portrait to me. The inclination of the face; the absence of arms and even the gentle mouth and smart eyes that most painters use to portray themselves makes it look like a classical self-portrait, as if executed by a right-handed painter looking at himself in the mirror and painting himself on a small canvas. In a way it is a self-portrait by Mao, because Warhol is silk screening an image of propaganda emphatically approved by Mao. When I started my leukaemia self-portraits I asked my assistant to measure the Mao portrait for getting the size right. 30.5cm he said precisely. Then I asked him to cut a piece of wood 30.5 by 30.5cm and mount a canvas on it."

 

José María Cano, September 2011