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Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

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Andy Warhol

Mao

1974

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Andy Warhol created this work by isolating the repeating element in his screenprinted wallpaper design featuring the face of Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong. Extensive media coverage of President Richard Nixon’s 1972 diplomatic visit to China made Chairman Mao a subject of fascination for the American public and for Warhol, whose art often explored ideas of celebrity in the contemporary world. That year Warhol began making numerous drawings, paintings, and prints based on a photograph of Mao from the frontispiece of a book of his quotations popularly known as The Little Red Book. Embellished with bright colors and rendered in a style similar to many of his portraits of celebrities from the entertainment world, Warhol’s images of Mao can be seen as humorously ironic takes on a leader then considered by many a threat to American democracy. Warhol produced the Mao wallpaper to hang behind a group of paintings of the leader for a 1974 exhibition in Paris that featured approximately two thousand of the artist’s Mao images in all. Conforming to Warhol’s longstanding interest in serial imagery, this explosion of Maos also mimicked the profusion of posters and billboards used to propagate Chairman Mao’s personality cult within China. FA18 (Common Read)

  • Artist Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987)
  • Title Mao
  • Date 1974
  • Medium Screen print
  • Edition description ed. unlimited, approx. 100 signed
  • Dimensions unframed | 39 5/8 x 29 7/8 in.
  • Credit line Gift of Arthur and Sheila Prensky, 2006
  • Object number WU 2006.0011.0009

11/26/2007
Dr. Arthur Prensky

Inscription Recto, lower left, in faded black ink: Andy Warhol

Recto, right edge, printed in purple ink:
Musee Galliera 23 Fevrier - 18 Mars Ouvert de 10 a 17 Ferme Mardi

Recto, left edge, printed in purple ink:
©1974 Andy Warhol Mao

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