Painting of Chairman Mao by Andy Warhol at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin Germany. A canvas by the Ameri
Painting of Chairman Mao by Andy Warhol at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin Germany. A canvas by the American pop artist Andy Warhol of the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong has sold for £ million - more than 18 times the price paid last time it went to auction. The artist was said to have been inspired to create the iconic series of Chairman Mao paintings by the historic visit of the then US president Richard Nixon to China in 1972. Warhol transformed the official portrait of the Chinese leader, in this case using the red and yellow colour scheme of the Cultural Revolution. It was last sold at auction in June 2000 for just £421,500. The paintings were excluded from a major show of Warhol's work exhibited in China last year. Speaking ahead of the show, the US-based Andy Warhol Museum who organised the tour of his work said: "Although we had hoped to include our Mao paintings in the exhibition to show Warhol's keen interest in Chinese culture, we understand that certain imagery is still not able to be shown in China." The organisers did not indicate whether they had been censored by Chinese authorities. The auction at Sotheby's in London also included the sale of Gerhard Richter's 1994 abstract work Wand (Wall) for £ million. The oil painting has been shown in 20 museum exhibitions, including a Richter retrospective “Forty Years of Painting” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but it had never before been offered for sale by the artist. The work, which exceeded its estimate, features “bold bands of cadmium red, blue and magenta” and showcases the revolutionary technique Richter developed in the previous decade. Another high-profile newcomer on to the art market was Lucian Freud's 1961 painting, “Head on a Green Sofa”, which sold for £ million. It depicts the British artist’s long-time companion Belinda “Bindy” Lady Lambton, who appears to be nude, with her famously angular face shown leaning on the arm of a green sofa,
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