Mao

The photograph underneath, and its missing author

The black layer is a photographic portrait of Mao Zedong reproduced through a screen. Tate's catalogue entry for its Mao prints identifies the source: "In 1972 Warhol used a photograph of Chairman Mao, taken from the frontispiece of Quotations from Chairman Mao-Tse Tung" — the book known in English as the Little Red Book — "as the basis for a series of paintings, prints and wallpaper." The 1966 English edition confirms the placement. Its cover is blank red with an embossed title and star, and the portrait is a full page following the title page. It carries no caption, no credit line and no photographer's name.

Tate is not consistent about this. Its printmaking page says Warhol used a photograph "from the cover of the Little Red Book", which the book itself contradicts; its scholarly catalogue entry says frontispiece, and that is right. The catalogue entry also dates the book to 1960, which is too early.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns the official portrait photograph itself — Chairman Mao, 1964, a gelatin silver print, accession number 2011.368 — and catalogues the artist as "Unknown", Chinese. It names Chen Shilin in a separate role, as the retoucher, not as the photographer. That is as close as any institution gets, and it is a statement that the author is not known rather than a name.

Warhol's practice through the 1960s and 1970s was to take a photograph somebody else had made and print it. In 2023 the Supreme Court decided Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith on that question, over a photograph of the musician Prince taken by Lynn Goldsmith. The Court's ruling turned on a commercial licence rather than on the paintings.

Why Mao, and when

Richard Nixon went to the People's Republic of China from 21 to 28 February 1972, the first serving American president to do so. Warhol began the first group of eleven Mao paintings the following month, in March 1972.

The curator Jessica Beck, formerly of The Andy Warhol Museum, records where the subject came from, quoting Bob Colacello's Holy Terror. The dealer Bruno Bischofberger suggested that Warhol paint the most important figure of the twentieth century, and proposed Albert Einstein. Warhol answered: "That's a good idea. But I was just reading in Life magazine that the most famous person in the world today is Chairman Mao. Shouldn't it be the most famous person, Bruno?"

The interest predates the trip. In a telephone call of September 1971, quoted by his biographer Blake Gopnik, Warhol said of Chinese imagery: "They don't believe in creativity. The only picture they ever have is of Mao Tse-tung. It's great. It looks like a silkscreen."

Paint first, photograph second

The Andy Warhol Museum describes his method as "the process of underpainting before adding the final photographic silkscreen print", and defines registration as "the process of lining up the image on the screen to the underpainting". On this canvas the two are not lined up, and the order of operations is visible everywhere on the surface.

On the right-hand side of the face the salmon stops well inside the printed contour and the blue of the background runs up over the cheek, so the ear is printed onto blue rather than onto flesh colour. Across the left cheek and temple, broad pale blue-white strokes wide enough to show their bristles run straight across the boundary of the printed face. Streaks of peach are dragged out into the blue background, following the brush, because the flesh colour was still wet when the blue went over it.

The same thing happens at the shoulder. A strip of salmon survives along the right shoulder between the green and the blue, where both were brushed over a broad patch of flesh colour from either side and did not meet. Below the chin the green comes up over the salmon, so streaks of pink show through the collar.

The Art Institute of Chicago, writing about its own monumental Mao, describes the same handling: "garish colors are applied to Mao's face like makeup. The gestural handling of color in the portrait shows Warhol at his most painterly." Warhol was less reverent about it. Gopnik records that he called the brushwork "hand jobs" and "abstract pseudo-painting", and said he could do it without even thinking.

The photographic image itself is a coarse halftone. At the eyes the dots are large enough to count one by one, and the eyebrows are simply where enough of them touch to read as solid. Along the shoulder the black thins to scattered dots and the green shows through, in a break that follows the direction of the pull rather than any edge in the photograph. The catalogue raisonné describes the first eleven paintings as run without cleaning ink build-up from the screen, so that they fade out across the group. The last of that run is a black print on bare canvas, with no colour under it at all.

One of about 199

Warhol made roughly 199 Mao paintings between 1972 and 1973, in five set sizes, a figure the Metropolitan Museum of Art states in its own object text. He worked the subject in prints and wallpaper as well, which is why a bare title and a bare date do not identify one.

The sizes run from 12 by 10 inches up to 176 1/2 by 136 1/2 inches, which is 448.3 by 346.7 centimetres. The Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art give that measurement identically for the two giants they each own. The Whitney's canvas sits in the small group, second smallest of the series, above only the miniatures.

The Whitney also owns the prints. Mao Tse-Tung, a portfolio of ten screenprints of 1972, is accession numbers 74.96.1 to 74.96.10. Those were printed by Styria Studio in New York in an edition of 250; the Whitney's set is an artist's proof, 46 of 50. Its own catalogue credits Peter M. Brant as publisher, which Tate's catalogue entry says is an error carried over from the standard print catalogue — Tate gives the publishers as Castelli Graphics and Multiples Inc.

The prints came first to the public. The Leo Castelli Gallery's own archive records Andy Warhol: Mao Prints at 420 West Broadway from 9 to 25 November 1972, and lists no Warhol exhibition of Mao paintings at all.

Paris, February 1974

The Mao paintings had their first major showing in Paris. The Art Institute of Chicago's registrarial record for its giant Mao opens its exhibition history with a single line: "Paris, Musee Galliera, Andy Warhol Mao, Feb. 23–Mar. 18, 1974, no cat." The prints catalogue raisonné gives the same dates independently, in its entry for the Mao wallpaper, which was printed by Bill Miller's Wallpaper Studio in New York for that exhibition.

The Musée Galliera on the avenue Pierre Ier de Serbie was then a City of Paris museum used for temporary exhibitions, including contemporary art; it had not yet become the fashion museum it is today. Because no catalogue was published, no checklist survives and the number of works cannot be stated. Bob Colacello, who was there, describes giant portraits in the main hall against walls papered in the purple-and-white Mao wallpaper, smaller rooms of medium-sized Mao paintings and the prints, and one room holding a hundred miniature Maos.

The French state bought a Warhol Mao the same year. The Centre Pompidou holds Mao, 1973, graphite on paper, 92 by 92.5 centimetres, signed and dated on the reverse, recorded as "Achat de l'Etat, 1974" with the inventory number AM 1974-18. Whether the purchase followed the Galliera exhibition is not stated anywhere.

What critics said

Three of the monumental Maos hung in Andy Warhol: Portraits of the 70s at the Whitney from November 1979 to January 1980, and the reviews were hostile. Hilton Kramer, in The New York Times of 23 November 1979, called the works "embellished photographic blowups—mainly silk-screened images sporting gaudy color and smeary brushwork", found the result "shallow and boring", and wrote that Warhol's work "belongs less to the history of painting than to the history of publicity".

Robert Hughes was harsher in Time on 3 December 1979. Warhol's admirers claimed he had revived the social portrait, Hughes wrote, but "it would be nearer the truth to say that he has zipped its corpse into a Halston, painted its eyelids and propped it in the back of a limo, where it moves but cannot speak".

The catalogue of that same exhibition carried the opposite view. Robert Rosenblum, writing on "Andy Warhol: Court Painter to the 70s", said that "Warhol has located the chairman in some otherworldly blue heaven, a secular deity of staggering dimensions who calmly and omnipotently watches over us earthlings".

No conservation or technical study of the Mao paintings appears to have been published. The earliest scholarly treatment is Anne Rorimer's "Andy Warhol's Mao, 1973" in the Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago of May–June 1975, written within a year of the Paris exhibition.

How it reached the Whitney

The painting was given to the Whitney Museum of American Art by Mr. and Mrs. Peter M. Brant. Its accession number is 76.44, and the museum's numbering — 68.25 for a 1968 purchase, 2002.272 for a 2002 gift — puts the accession in 1976. The Brants had already given the museum the print portfolio, 74.96.1 to .10, two years earlier.

They gave elsewhere too. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's monumental Mao of 1972 is a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Peter M. Brant, 1977; its print portfolio is their gift of 1974; the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art hold portfolios from the same source. Much of the Mao material in American public collections arrived through them.

The Whitney publishes no interpretive text on this painting: no wall label, no visual description, no exhibition history. The only descriptive line on its record is machine-generated. Where the paintings were made is also unrecorded, though the Factory was at 33 Union Square West from 1967 until the move to 860 Broadway in 1974, which places the Maos there.

The museum's photograph of the painting was taken on 18 June 2012 by Robert Gerhardt and Denis Y. Suspitsyn. Andy Warhol died in 1987 and the work is in copyright; the Whitney prints "© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York" on its record. The reproduction here is shown reduced under fair use for commentary and excluded from commercial reuse.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

A head-and-shoulders portrait of Mao Zedong, with the photograph printed in black over colour that was brushed on first. The hand painting and the photograph do not line up, and the places where they miss each other are the subject of most of what follows.

Detail views use the same reproduction throughout. Whitney Museum of American Art object record, 76.44.