DALLAS, TX.- Heritage Auctions announced that the centerpiece of its December 10 Modern & Contemporary Art Signature® Auction is Andy Warhol’ iconic 1973 painting Mao. This example of Warhol’s portrait of Mao Tse-tung is one of the most desirable from the late artist’s iconic portrait series of China’s Chairman. Warhol’s decision in the early ’70s to take on such a loaded subject marked his return to form — evoking his silkscreened celebrities of the 1960s — but this time with a knowing impulse to turn our definition of “celebrity,” if not painting itself, into a challenge for an evolving art world that increasingly embraced the conceptual underpinnings of Warhol’s genius.

The painting, awash in Warhol’s canny use of blue, burgundy, ochre and black, is arguably the most approachable and visually enticing of the entire series of 16 original paintings of Mao he created at this size. This one comes with outstanding provenance, having once belonged to acclaimed designer and longtime Warhol partner Jed Johnson, and later to Johnson’s brother Jay Johnson and his partner Tom Cashin. This painting’s entry in Warhol’scatalogue raisonné describes the handwritten note on the back of the painting and illuminates something of its early life: “An inscription, ‘to Gordon and George’ on the verso is crossed out. It is not clear whether the work was ever given by Warhol to the dealer Gordon Locksley and his partner George Shea, or whether he changed his mind and gave the canvas to Jed Johnson.”

Says Frank Hettig, Heritage’s Vice President of Modern & Contemporary Art, “The painting went to Jed Johnson. Johnson of course met Warhol in 1968, when he was just 19 years old, and started as a janitor at Warhol's studio, the Factory. Warhol saw tremendous potential in him and quickly offered him household management roles, and eventually more significant professional roles, including editing films like Warhol’s Bad and Heat. Johnson’s keen eye for aesthetics later led him to a career as one of the most successful interior designers of his generation. The deep personal history and connection between Warhol and Johnson is a profound part of Warhol’s very legacy, as well as that of this painting.”

Warhol’s unexpected death in 1987 deeply affected Johnson, and tragically Johnson passed away in 1996 in the crash of TWA Flight 800. His own legacy endures in both his design work and his contributions to Warhol’s output. Johnson’s brother, Jay, inherited this work, and it later became part of the important Ammann collection from which it was acquired by Heritage’s consignor. The work, which is signed twice, holds a special place in Warhol’s and Pop Art’s history.

In advance of the December 10 auction, which Warhol’s painting anchors and will take the block as the auction’s final lot, the art critic and Warhol historian Blake Gopnik wrote about Warhol’s Mao for Heritage:

When Andy Warhol began his Chairman Mao project, early in 1972, it represented his first notable body of images in almost a decade … Warhol was still hurting from the assassin’s bullet that had (briefly) killed him in June of 1968. Since he still had a studio to fund, it’s tempting to see his Maos as taking an easy, marketable step back toward the Pop Art that had first made him famous. His Mao works might be just more riffs on cultural superstars, taking off from the Marilyns and Jackies and Elvises of the early 1960s. The Maos are that, of course — the Chairman was certainly an international celebrity, with a face at least as well-known as any actor’s — but they also bear important witness to Warhol’s deep engagement with the particular artistic moment he was in.

The Maos came at a moment when the Color Field abstraction of Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler still held sway among most supporters of what passed for ‘advanced’ art, as we have now mostly forgotten. Warhol’s new series clearly engaged with that tradition. The Mao in this auction plays with the tensions between ‘fields’ of brilliant blue, orange and red ... In their thick brushwork, the paintings also echo the surface effects that were so important to Jules Olitski and Larry Poons, the latest art stars of that era who used the new acrylic medium, also there in Warhol’s Maos, to turn their canvases into relief maps of paint.

But even as Warhol was successfully engaging with the latest abstraction, he was opening up an ironic distance from it. Rather than advocating for the virtues of purely formal experimentation, the Maos come closer to proclaiming it moribund, at a moment when, out on the furthest cutting edge of the art world, the recent declarations of the Death of Painting were read less as diagnoses than as obituaries ... Warhol’s Maos might count as his signature on a note of condolence to painting.

To read all of Blake Gopnik’s essay on this example of Warhol’s Mao and to learn more about Andy Warhol’s 1973 painting Mao and the December 10 Modern & Contemporary Art Signature® Auction, please go here.

And please note: A strong selection of Warhol’s prints will be offered in Heritage’s December 10 Prints & Multiples Signature® Auction, which immediately follows this auction. Among the hightlights of this group is a marvelous complete portfolio of Warhol’s 1978 portrait series of Muhammad Ali.