Mao (F. & S. II.95)
Mao (F. & S. II.95)
Signed Print
Andy Warhol
91 x 91cm, Edition of 250, Screenprint, 1972
£23,000-£35,000
$45,000-$70,000 Market Value Indicator
$45,000-$70,000 Market Value Indicator
¥200,000-¥310,000 Market Value Indicator
€27,000-€40,000 Market Value Indicator
$240,000-$360,000 Market Value Indicator
¥4,820,000-¥7,340,000 Market Value Indicator
$30,000-$45,000 Market Value Indicator
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Meaning & Analysis
Mao (F. & S. II.95) is a screenprint made in 1972. It presents a near-square frontal portrait of Mao Zedong based on the official photograph from his Little Red Book, with the face rendered in pale tones against a sage green background. Warhol added blue eyeshadow and loose gestural ink scribbles across the face and ground. Signed and numbered from an edition of 250.
Warhol made the Mao series in 1972, the same year President Nixon visited China – a moment that brought Mao's image into Western living rooms with new intensity. The source was the official portrait from the Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, then in wider global circulation than any other publication. By that measure, Warhol was appropriating the most reproduced portrait in history – treating it with exactly the same method applied to Marilyn Monroe.
The screenprint process translates the official photograph into something unstable. Cosmetic additions – blue eyeshadow, pink-flushed lips – feminise and glamorise the image through the same logic of the celebrity portrait. The sage green background, applied with visible, gestural brushwork, introduces the handmade mark that the photographic source entirely lacks. Black ink scribbles – loose, calligraphic – move across the face and ground, particularly dense on the right side of the composition.
These scribbles vary across the edition. Each of the 250 prints carries slightly different mark-making, making each technically unique within a serial framework – a contradiction Warhol understood as central to his practice, and one that complicates the neat equation between mass reproduction and the erasure of the individual hand.
