Andy Warhol
United States, b.1928, d.1987
Mao Tse-Tung
- 1972
- Screenprint
- Purchased 1975
- 904 x 904mm
- 75/51
Location: Monica Richards Gallery
Tags: blue (color), librarians, men (male humans), people (agents), politicians, Pop (fine arts styles), portraits
Colin McCahon was an important figure in Jonathan Mane-Wheoki’s (Ngāpuhi, Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Kuri) life – first a family friend when Mane-Wheoki’s family moved to Titirangi in the 1950s, and then a teacher when he attended the night classes McCahon taught in the attic of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. While he was a student at the University of Canterbury, Mane-Wheoki frequently visited the Robert McDougall Art Gallery to view McCahon’s Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is, and the work held a special place in his heart. The other two works shown here were purchased when Mane-Wheoki was in London studying at the Courtauld Institute of Art. While there, he was commissioned by the cDougall Gallery to purchase works for the collection. In 1974, Mane-Wheoki recommended the entire budget he had available be allocated for the purchase of this Degas etching, and the following year he secured this Andy Warhol print, both small yet exemplary international works.
(Living Archives, 25 October 2025 – 8 March 2026, exhibited alongside 'Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is' by Colin McCahon and 'Manet assis, tourné à droite' by Edgar Degas)
Exhibition History
Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016
Closely associated with notions of fame and popular culture, Andy Warhol was a leading name in American pop art, and renowned for using the aesthetics of advertising and commercial printing techniques in his work.
Warhol’s screenprint of Mao Tse-Tung was made when communist China’s founder was still alive. It adapted a portrait that was used throughout China in veneration of its leader and his ideas. The blue-faced Chairman Mao is one of a series of colour variations Warhol created, all equally startling. He made similar portraits of American icons including Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley and Mickey Mouse.
Brought to light February 2010 – February 2011
Andy Warhol was famous for creating memorable images of the celebrities and historical figures of his generation, including Marilyn Monroe, Sigmund Freud and Elvis Presley. The subject of this screenprint, Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976), was the revolutionary founder of Communist China and controlled almost a billion people for over twentyfive years. Using the impersonal technique of screenprinting to create a mask of vivid colours, Warhol has portrayed Mao not as a political leader, but as a product of the cult of personality – instantly recognisable and packaged for dispersal to a mass audience.
Mao Tse Tung (1893-1976) was the revolutionary founder of Communist China and, as leader, controlled almost a billion people for over 25 years. Andy Warhol has portrayed him as a product of mass culture, instantly recognisable and packaged for dispersal to a wide audience. The impersonal screenprinting technique, with its mask of vivid colours, conveys the universal power of a recognisable image, but reveals almost nothing about Mao’s character or the political history he symbolises. Warhol was born to immigrant Czechoslovakian parents in Pittsburgh in the United States. He studied at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and was a successful commercial illustrator in New York in the 1950s. Warhol began exhibiting his paintings with silk-screened Pop Art imagery in 1962 and in 1963 he began making films. Warhol became famous for creating memorable images of celebrities and historical figures of his generation, including Marilyn Monroe, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Elvis Presley. (Opening Gallery hang 2003)
Related reading: Op + Pop
film
Andy Warhol - Mao Tse-tung
Gallery archivist Tim Jones describes how the screenprint Mao Tse-tung by Andy Warhol came into the colleciton.
Notes
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Notes
Untitled 1956 by Gordon Walters
This article first appeared as 'Balancing act' in The Press on 17 August 2012.
Notes
Glittering
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Selected proofs
Peter Trevelyan's exhibition Selected Proofs is currently on at the University of Canterbury's SOFA Gallery until 7th September.
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The pleasure of making: objects taking centre stage in the space of the art gallery
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Article
New Zealand in the Biennale of Sydney and the Biennale of Sydney in New Zealand
and the Biennale of Sydney in New Zealand
Collection
Reuben Paterson Te Pūtahitanga ō Rehua
As a young boy, Reuben Paterson used to play with the sparkling black sand on Piha beach; now as an artist he often uses glitter in his works. In this one, he took inspiration from Māori mythology connected with water, cleansing, transformation and stars. Pūtahitanga can mean constellation. Rehua was a son of Rangi-nui (the sky father) and Papa-tū-ā-nuku (the earth mother), and is associated in Tūhoe legend with the star Antares. To make this dazzling kaleidoscopic landscape, Paterson digitally layered and rearranged his own drawings. He likens the shifting black and white patterns to the restless energies and histories that have unfolded on the whenua (land) of Aotearoa New Zealand. Their optical push-and-pull highlights that what can be seen depends on who is doing the looking. What catches your eye?
(Wheriko - Brilliant! 17 May 2019 – 16 February 2020)
Collection
Julia Morison Tootoo
Julia Morison’s Tootoo was created as part of a brim-full series of multi-panelled paintings called Gargantua’s Petticoat. The series is an array of riotous provocation, full of abstracted sensual forms that allude to corsetry and piercings, petticoats and hula hoops, bed springs and bandages. Julia was painting lecturer at the University of Canterbury from 1999–2007. This followed eight years living in France, an originally unanticipated outcome of being awarded the one-year Moët et Chandon Fellowship artist residency in 1990.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Simon Morris June Pause
Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016
Packed with an energetic sense of movement, Simon Morris’s painting gives the effect of a boldly rhythmic musical score. Its pattern, appearing at first to be random or chaotic, is found to be sequenced and repeating, and with diagonals regularly breaking up the picture plane.
Morris builds on the legacy of pioneering New Zealand geometric abstractionists such as Carl Sydow and Gordon Walters. This optical sequence was generated by a mathematical formula, which he says “creates images that I wouldn’t come up with myself. It’s like the system partly makes the work.”