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Lot Essay
In 1972, President Nixon of the United States made an historic visit to China, signaling an important rapprochement between the two powerful nations during the Cold War. Executed in 1973, Mao XI is part of a series of images that Warhol created, that takes as its subject one of the most politicised images known to the West, that of their great antagonist, Chairman Mao. Warhol chose this subject matter during a period in which commissioned glamour portraits dominated his artistic output. Mao's portrait was the perfect antidote to the increasingly commercial nature of his art. Whereas formerly his work had ironised the consumer world, now he found himself enshrined as the mainstream, the new must-have. Mao's iconic face was as recognisable to Americans as a tin of Campbell's soup, but carried far more subversive baggage with it. In a sense, Warhol's mass-production of Mao's face mimicked the prevalence of the same image in China, where almost every building showed it. Where Warhol had previously taken images from the world of consumers, be it in the form of adverts or products, here he took the exact antithesis, Mao. While Warhol had rediscovered his ability to create something that potently attacked the bourgeois values with which he had increasingly found himself associated, he also knew how to manipulate his audience and collectors, creating an image that he knew would be commercially successful and essentially turning Mao into a product, a brand.
In his silkscreen images of Mao, Warhol tended to add his own painterly touches, disrupting the homogeneity even of his own earlier work. This disruption is even stronger in Mao XI, which Warhol drew by hand. Although the image of Mao is still visibly based on the mass-produced portrait so well-known to the world, the fact that Warhol himself has painstakingly reproduced it, showcasing his formidable draughtsmanship, ironises even the mechanical and studio processes Warhol favoured in his own art and which themselves are linked to the Communist work ethic. Warhol even plays with the concept of Communism by emphasising the individual, making the political image of Mao into an art-object. In Mao XI, Warhol manages both to equate and denigrate the two opposing political systems of the East and the West.
In his silkscreen images of Mao, Warhol tended to add his own painterly touches, disrupting the homogeneity even of his own earlier work. This disruption is even stronger in Mao XI, which Warhol drew by hand. Although the image of Mao is still visibly based on the mass-produced portrait so well-known to the world, the fact that Warhol himself has painstakingly reproduced it, showcasing his formidable draughtsmanship, ironises even the mechanical and studio processes Warhol favoured in his own art and which themselves are linked to the Communist work ethic. Warhol even plays with the concept of Communism by emphasising the individual, making the political image of Mao into an art-object. In Mao XI, Warhol manages both to equate and denigrate the two opposing political systems of the East and the West.