Mao

Andy Warhol made this series of Mao Zedong portraits in 1972, the same year President Nixon made his historic visit to China. The image itself comes from the official portrait printed in Mao's "Little Red Book," a photo that millions of people in China saw every day. Warhol took this familiar piece of propaganda and ran with it, repeating Mao's face again and again and slapping on wild, unnatural colors like blue skin, green faces, and bright pink backgrounds. The loose, scribbly lines drawn over each face make them feel almost handmade, even though they started from a mechanical printing process.

There is a playful joke buried in all of this. Mao was the leader of communist China, where individual fame and consumer culture were rejected, yet Warhol turned him into exactly the kind of pop celebrity you might see on a magazine cover or a soup can label. The garish makeup-like colors almost poke fun at the seriousness of the original portrait. By treating a powerful political figure the same way he treated Marilyn Monroe or Elvis, Warhol blurred the line between politics and pop stardom, suggesting that in the modern world, image is everything no matter who you are.

This is one of Warhol's most recognizable bodies of work, and he eventually made hundreds of these Mao paintings in different sizes. Seeing them lined up together really drives home his fascination with repetition and mass production, the very ideas that defined the Pop Art movement he helped lead.