Untitled, from New York Collection for Stockholm

This print is from the “New York Collection for Stockholm Portfolio,” created by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), an organization founded by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman and engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer in 1966. The non-profit connected artists with engineers and scientists to forge collaborative relationships that supported artists’ needs for technology and generated new forms of media. In 1971, Klüver and Carl Gunnar Pontus Hultén, the director of Stockholm’s modern art museum, Moderna Museet, selected a group of paintings and sculptures created by artists who were prominent in New York City in the 1960s for the museum’s permanent collection. Each of these artists contributed a print to the “New York Collection for Stockholm Portfolio,” which was sold as a fundraiser to support the museum's acquisition of their work. For Warhol’s contribution to the portfolio, he instructed E.A.T. staff to make three hundred sequential copies of his original drawing. Enlargement and distortion occurred with each photocopy. Each print in the edition marks a unique phase in this transformative process. The original portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong, the revolutionary politician who founded the People's Republic of China, is gradually abstracted across the prints, transformed into non-representational lines and dots.