Andy Warhol’s 1972 series of portraits of Chinese leader Mao Zedong is titled Mao.
Warhol created the series after President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China brought Mao prominently into international news. He adapted an official-looking photographic image of Mao and repeated it across canvases, applying vivid colors, painterly marks, and variations in surface treatment.
The series demonstrates Warhol’s method of turning a widely circulated image of a powerful public figure into a commodity-like visual icon. Mao joined earlier Warhol subjects such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Jacqueline Kennedy, but the political source image gave the project a particularly charged context.
A common mistake is to treat Mao as one single painting. Warhol produced numerous works in the series, with differences in scale, color, and brushwork. The title is generally given simply as Mao, rather than as a longer descriptive phrase.