Silk Screen Portrait of Mao Tse Tung

Andy Warhol's Mao Tse Tung (1972) is a silk-screen portrait of the Chinese leader that was made in many versions. It is one of the series of silk-screens that he made on the subject of fame. They began in the early 1960s with his many portraits of Marilyn Monroe whose sad death in 1962 led him to contemplation of what it meant to be famous and what it could possibly be worth. The fame of the individuals in these portraits was usually of the Hollywood variety and various representations of Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, and others are among the best known. Usually the different versions employed the same image--sometimes repeatedly within the same piece. In every instance, however, Warhol's method was to use appropriated images. They were usually taken from the press or from Hollywood promotional materials and adapted for the artist's purposes,

In these paintings Warhol also made many points about applying mechanized methods of reproduction to "fine arts," thereby turning fine art into consumer goods. And, by implication, the people in the 'fame' portraits were, in a sense, consumer goods themselves. He called his studio "The Factory" and he and his assistants turned out as many as 80 silk-screens per day. Despite all this emphasis on mechanical reproduction, however, he always preferred the signs of the human touch in the work. He could have had them made in a real factory and made so as to be indistinguishable from each other. Instead he "preferred th

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a political picture. Mao, who was born in 1883, founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and was still ruler there (as Chairman of the Communist Party) when he died in 1976. He was an inspirational leader, as the publication of his quotations indicates, and he was a daily presence to the millions of Chinese who looked to him for leadership. The original picture is a rectangle approximately one-third again as long as it is wide and the Chairman looks directly toward the camera with a benevolent expression on his face. He seems to have a slight, kindly smile but is, at the same time, clearly a serious person. Appropriately enough for the use of a picture that was originally reproduced in the millions, the Warhol versions look like one of the most ordinary of mechanized reproductions of portraits of world leaders; that is, they look like nothing so much as a postage stamp--with a few scribbles from a colored felt pen. Warhol made both square versions and versions with the same proportions as the original photograph. The background in the original, as is appropriate in twentieth-century leaders' pictures, is blank. Some of Warhol's versions feature dashes and squiggles of black line that were added to the picture alon

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