ANDY WARHOL | RED LENIN (FELDMAN & SCHELLMANN II.403)

Andy Warhol’s inimitable aesthetic is a celebration of culture stripped of context. How else could controversial material achieve an impact that intended to appeal artistically without provoking indignation? 

His depiction of the electric chair and of Mao Tse-Tung, both in the early 1970s, and his haunting portraits of Lenin, the editions completed after the artist’s  death in 1987, all exemplify Warhol’s characteristic practice of divesting his subjects of political ramifications.

Lenin, the 1918-1924 government leader whose Communist rule oversaw the violent transition from Russian state to Soviet Union, is remembered by biographer Louis Fischer as “a lover of radical change and maximum upheaval". Many decades later, Andy Warhol presided over a vastly different kind of revolution, repackaging cultural figures as ornaments inviting conversations on artistic implication rather than historic significance.