安迪·沃荷

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York

M. Knoedler & Co., New York

André Emmerich Gallery, Inc., New York

Joni Gordon, Los Angeles

Sotheby’s, New York, 24 September 2014, Lot 12 (consigned by the above)

Acquired from the above by the present owner

New York, Museum of Modern Art; Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago; London, Hayward Gallery; Cologne, Museum Ludwig; Venice, Palazzo Grassi; and Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, February 1989 - September 1990, p. 336, no. 353, illustrated in colour

Neil Printz and Sally King Nero, Eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures, Vol. 3, 1970-1974, New York 2010, p. 249, no. 2445, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly deeper and richer in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
"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."

Executed between 1972 and 1973, Andy Warhol’s portraits of Chairman Mao embody the artist’s first critically and commercially successful body of work after his eight-year hiatus from painting. Following his near-fatal shooting in 1968 he entered a time of reflection and re-evaluation in his art, and up to this point, the early 1970s work had been dominated by society portraits. Although Warhol had broached the American political arena a decade earlier with his Electric Chair and Race Riots, both from 1963, it was not until his Mao paintings that he engaged with the contentious international political concerns that were at the forefront of the global consciousness. Proving Warhol’s finely tuned ability to draw on the sociopolitical had lost none of its power, this contentious body of work evinced a retort to American foreign policy and subversively turned communist leader into capitalist commodity.

The idea to paint Chairman Mao Tse-tung had taken seed in Warhol’s imagination ever since Nixon’s televised announcement in July 1971 of a sanctioned visit to China. Following the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, America’s refusal to recognise the new communist government drew an iron curtain between China and the US that lasted over twenty years. In an effort to thaw Sino-American relations and in a tactical move to help resolve the Vietnam War, Nixon was the first President to visit the People’s Republic of China. Following Nixon’s trip in February 1972, Warhol was quick off the mark; work on the first Mao paintings began the very next month. The choice of subject was thus timely and suited Warhol’s trademark vacillation between detachment and censure. As stated by Bob Colacello: “Andy wasn’t apolitical; he was ruthless. Mao was a brilliant choice, and Andy’s timing was perfect. The Mao paintings, when they were exhibited a year later in New York, Zurich, and Paris, were greeted with universal acclaim. They were controversial, commercial, and important, just like the man they portrayed and the man who painted them. And they were all about power: the power of one man over the lives of one billion people” (Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Up Close, New York 1990, p. 111).

Moving seamlessly from celebrities and popular culture for his source imagery, Warhol's induction of the mythic, deified image of the Communist leader into an art form that fetishised consumerist objects is wonderfully subversive. Warhol's source image derives from an official portrait of the authoritarian ruler that was exhibited prominently above the Tiananmen Square gate where, in 1949, Mao had announced the founding of the People's Republic of China. Symbolising perpetual surveillance, 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'; a publication 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. Fascinated by the ubiquitous proliferation of this single image, Warhol would have undoubtedly picked up on affinities between the mass-media derivation of his own work and the propagandist role of Mao’s official portrait.

By channeling the iconic communist leader through expressive painterly flourishes, Warhol transmutes political significance: no longer does Mao represent a symbolic threat to the American dream, rather, he has been assimilated and introduced into the vacuous cult of celebrity. Throughout the cultural revolution of the previous decade, Chairman Mao had all but extinguished popular culture in China and substituted himself in the place of the stars of stage and screen. Here, Warhol appropriates and subverts this policy. Defacing Mao’s deified portrait with undulating brushstrokes of saturated blues and greens, he installs him as an icon of American Pop.