ANDY WARHOL | Mao

Ferdinando Scarfiotti, Los Angeles / Rome
Thence by descent to the present owner

Neil Printz and Sally King Nero, Eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures, Vol. 3, 1970-1974, New York 2010, p. 252, no. 2471, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals a hairline tension crack running intermittently along the edges. Further extremely close inspection reveals some very light and unobtrusive wear in isolated places along the extreme edges and corner tips with a few minute specks of loss to the extreme corner tips. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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Astonishingly painterly and multiply unique, this completely unseen, and only just rediscovered twelve by ten inch Mao forms part of Andy Warhol’s iconic 1972 to 1973 series of the same name: an exuberant proclamation of the artist’s long awaited-return to painting after a four year hiatus in experimental film. Attesting to the work’s rarity, it has not been seen in public since its creation and is the only work from this pivotal series that is shown in black and white in Warhol’s encylopaedic Catalogue Raisonné. With a face of cadmium orange standing in stunning chromatic opposition to a lush range of green background hues, the present Mao is the only member of the series whose ‘Mao jacket’ is printed in black and white: a pairing whose close association to archived photography makes the work appear sourced from the very image bank of history. Produced from approximately late December 1972 to August 1973, the sub-series of twelve by ten inch Maos to which the present work belongs, evinces truly exceptional swathes of gestural brushwork, from an artist whose otherwise aesthetically dominant love for the mechanised defines both his oeuvre and his intersubjective gestalt. Using an extraordinarily dense impasto thickened with a clear acrylic medium, Warhol generously traces the contours of the dictator’s head and shoulders; partially covering the silkscreen print below with his tripartite media of acrylic colour, clear gel and varnish. His use of varnish over his silkscreen prints, until this sub-series unprecedented, creates in certain works of the sub-series a diaphanous sheen over pre-existing layers of paint. With the external layer of paint both more visceral and extensive than Maos of any other size, this sub-series frequently bears coloured tacking edges; revealing Warhol’s outstandingly tenacious paint application even after the canvas had been stretched. In every sense of the words, the present work announces Warhol’s return to painting and utterly summates the artist's iconic artistic lexicon.  The twelve by ten inch Maos were often given by the artist as Christmas presents to his friends: a playful, wry commentary – typical of Warhol’s idiom – on the disparity between the asceticism of Chinese society after the Cultural Revolution and the untempered consumerism of US public holidays. Part of a fascinating narrative that only recently came to light, the present Mao was one such gift, and bears the inscription ‘To David M C A W’ – meaning ‘Merry Christmas, Andy Warhol’ – on its reverse. The present Mao was bought by the illustrious Italian film designer, producer and director Ferdinando Scarfiotti, quite possibly out of the Factory directly. The work has since resided in just one collection for over fifty years, resulting in its never having been exhibited nor seen by public eyes. Consequently, the present work enacts the rare coincidence of two poignant returns: the return of the artist to his defining aesthetic medium, and the return of a hidden masterpiece to the forefront of the art market.

Given that Warhol’s four year hiatus from painting was spent principally in film production, it is beautifully fitting that the present work ended up in Scarfiotti’s hands. Known affectionately as ‘Nando’ to his friends (of which Warhol was one) the revered American director and screenwriter Paul Schrader has described Scarfiotti as “the most influential film designer of the last three decades. His work has influenced an entire generation of directors and designers” (Paul Schrader cited in: Richard Kelly, ‘Ferdinando Scarfiotti 1941 – 1994: Excursions into style’, Critical Quarterly, Vol. 38, Issue 2, p. 3). While Scarfiotti’s production design with Death in Venice (1971) and American Gigolo (1980) cemented his status in the film industry as brilliant and meticulous, it was for The Last Emperor (1987) that he won an Oscar for Best Art Direction; with a great proportion of the film’s power attributed by critics to the impact of its set design. Through a sumptuous partnership of reds and golds, Scarfiotti recreated the Forbidden City in Beijing: a bastion of Chinese imperialism constructed over five hundred years before Mao’s systematic destruction of its signifiers. With their shared belief in the priority of surface over substance – the dependence of ideas on their mode of presentation – Warhol and Scarfiotti had a huge amount in common.

Warhol’s choice of image for the Mao series was the official portrait reproduced as the frontispiece in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1964), known in the West as the ‘Little Red Book’. Itself based on an official portrait of Mao hanging in Tiananmen Square, the portrait was the most widely reproduced and seen image in China for decades. Knowingly serialising the serialised, Warhol elected the picture for his series partly to induce a delectable reduction of severe political propaganda to the levity of image-fetish. Through the use of delicate brushwork on the eyebrows and lips of the dictator, Warhol presents Mao almost in drag; instantiating a liberal politics at comical and subversive odds with the radically intolerant rhetoric of his political agenda. Accordingly, just as Warhol had posed for Christopher Makos in drag – revealing the status of gender as performance through the exaggeration of its tropes – he posed for the same photographer in a Mao jacket when visiting China in 1982. But perhaps most significantly, it was his obsession with fame that drove Warhol to choose Mao as a subject. According to Life magazine, Mao was the most famous figure on the globe in 1971. Using the image of the dictator as a vehicle, the present work epitomises Warhol’s complex eulogy to idolatry and celebrity.