Beschreibung:

Andy Warhol Mao 1974 Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas. 12 1/8 x 10 1/8 in. (30.8 x 25.7 cm). Signed and dated “Andy Warhol 74” and stamped with the Authentication Board seal and numbered “A108.042” on the overlap
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist; Marvin Ross Friedman & Company, Miami; Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco Catalogue Essay “Andy Warhol’s portraits of Chairman Mao are the most paradoxical ofmodern masterworks. Television coverage of Nixon’s historic trip to Chinain 1972 exposed the artist to the world’s most famous political image. Inlove with fame, Warhol fearlessly placed Mao’s smiling, seemingly benignface at the very core of a stunning, original body of painting,” (R. Mnuchin,D. Lévy, Andy Warhol Mao, NewYork, 2006).The beginning of the 1970s was a transitional period in the storied career ofAndy Warhol. His rise to fame in the 1960s saw him redefine the Americanavant-garde, upending the seriousness of high-Modernism with a rash ofbold colors, graphic imagery, repetition, groundbreaking experimental films,irony, and an unabashed celebration of capitalism, consumer culture, andthe entrepreneurial ethos. By the late 1960s, however, Warhol’s star hadrisen about as high as seemed possible, and art world critics and curators,eager to discover the next big thing, became less enthusiastic about hiswork. Still reeling from the near-fatal gunshot wound delivered on June 3,1968 by Valerie Solanas, as the 1970s began a delicate Warhol found that hisavant-garde credibility had expired—he had become a victim of his ownsuccess with no clear path to take.The 1970s, however, would see Warhol successfully make the leap fromavant-garde darling to the most influential society portraitist of hisgeneration, thanks in no small part to his inspired choice for anuncommissioned portrait—the massively influential Chinese revolutionaryleader Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. In 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon’shistoric trip to China to repair twenty-two years of animosity between thetwo countries thrust Mao—whose Quotations from Chairman Mao (TheLittle Red Book) was already the second best-seller only to the Bible—intothe U.S. media spotlight. Warhol’s stated goal in producing the Mao series,which consisted of thousands of paintings, prints, and wallpaperinstallations, was to obtain the Chairman’s patronage in the hopes that anofficial mandate from Mao would result in an endless supply of revenue inthe form of commissioned portraits for every government office, school andpublic venue in China. While the communist revolutionary did not, ofcourse, elect to do business with the foremost purveyor of Americancapitalist imagery, the success of the Mao portraits did spark a renewedinterest in Warhol in his new role as portrait artist; he would go on toproduce thousands of commissioned portraits of almost every noteworthyAmerican icon of the period.Most notable about the Mao series, including the present lot, from a stylisticstandpoint is Warhol’s use of visible, expressionistic brushwork over hisstandard off-register silkscreen technique and bright Pop colors.Thepresent lot, for example, renders the Chairman’s face in a neon orange,suspending it over a swirling cloud of blue and white, the brush-marks moreclearly visible than ever before. While Warhol’s early paintings andsilkscreen works presented an impenetrable façade of flat coolness and anpurposefully opaque intentionality as antidote to the emotive and expressivebrushstrokes of the Abstract Expressionist movement that Pop succeeded,for his Mao series Warhol revived the expressionist aesthetic with the intentof having it express nothing. Ever the ironist, Warhol was quoted asdeclaring that “The ‘hand-painted look’ was now in fashion,” (N. Hiromoto,“Andy Warhol: Conditions of Art,” Andy Warhol Tokyo, 2000), reducing theentrenched connection between personal vision and painterly gesture thatwas a basic tenet of Abstract Expressionism to a “look” that could beapplied to a painting as a decorative motif absent of any deeper symbolism.Whether or not the painters of the previous generation appreciated theappropriation—to say nothing of Chairman Mao’s feelings about havingbeen immortalized by the