The Many Versions of Mao Tse Tung

By 1970, however, Warhol had drifted away from painting. In one more attempt to shock the public--for the functionality of getting attention and to your purpose of continuing to shake up people's thinking about art--he even pretended that his assistants had been generating all of the work anyway, a claim he later recanted.

But from the early seventies he "rediscovered his interest in painting having a series of society portraits and pictures of Mao Tse Tung" (Fineberg 257). The photograph he used was appropriated in the cover of the famous Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, named "The Smaller Red Book," which was an English-language version on the book that was a well-liked aid for faithful Party members in China. The 1966 publication in the quotations in English "was carried close to by campus radicals on the late sixties" like a sort of radical credential (Fineberg 259). Warhol's portrait of Mao had many layers of meaning invested in it but probably the most obvious was its resonance being a sort of "ideological pornography," as Fineberg puts it, which "titillated the wealthy collector although at the same time confirming the triumph of funds by transforming the great hero of the anti-capitalist world revolution inside a client excellent for ones rich" (257).

Appropriately sufficient to your use of the picture that was originally reproduced inside the millions, the Warhol versions seem like probably the most ordinary of mechanized reproductions of portraits of globe leaders; that is, they glimpse like nothing so a lot as being a postage stamp--with several scribbles from a colored felt pen. Warhol made each square versions and versions from the same proportions as the original photograph. The background within the original, as is right in twentieth-century leaders' pictures, is blank. Some of Warhol's versions feature dashes and squiggles of black line that were added towards picture along with roughly laid on layers of a single opaque color. But others supply washes of transparent color that sometimes resemble blue skies.

eal over this. The original photograph was, of course, 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 with the Communist Party) as soon as he died in 1976. He was an inspirational leader, as the publication of his quotations indicates, and he was a daily presence towards the millions of Chinese who looked to him for leadership. The original picture is really a rectangle approximately one-third once more as extended as it is wide and the Chairman seems directly toward the camera using a benevolent expression on his face. He appears to have a slight, kindly smile but is, at the same time, clearly a serious person.

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