- Museum number
- 2016,7038.1
- Title
- Object: Vote McGovern
- Description
-
Head and shoulders portrait of President Richard Nixon pictured with a bright green and blue face and pink jacket against an orange background. The words 'VOTE MCGOVERN' are printed below. 1972
Colour screenprint
- Production date
- 1972
- Dimensions
-
Height: 1067 millimetres (sheet)
-
Width: 1067 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Warhol made this print at the time of the United States' presidential elections in 1972 as a fund-raiser for the Democratic candidate, Senator George McGovern. It was his first print for a political campaign. The image of Nixon, McGovern's Republican opponent, was taken from an official publicity photograph of President Nixon and his wife, which was published on the front cover of 'Newsweek' magazine on 27 January 1969. This was the only print that Warhol made with master printer Ken Tyler at the Gemini Print Workshop in Los Angeles. It was published in an edition of 250.
Text from Coppel, Daunt and Tallman, 'The American Dream: pop to the present', London: Thames and Hudson in association with the British Museum, 2017, cat. no. 139:
For the presidential elections in 1972 Warhol was persuaded to make this print as a fundraiser in support of the Democratic candidate Senator George McGovern. It was his first print for a political campaign; he later produced others in support of the Democratic presidential candidates Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Edward Kennedy in 1980. Warhol pictured Richard Nixon, McGovern’s Republican opponent, with a livid green face, yellow lips and demonic orange eyes, beneath which a graffiti-like hand has scrawled ‘Vote McGovern’. Warhol lifted the source image from an official publicity photograph of President and Mrs Richard M. Nixon on the front cover of 'Newsweek' (27 January 1969), transferring the green colour of Mrs Nixon’s conservative outfit to her husband’s face. Ben Shahn’s 1964 political screenprint poster 'Vote Johnson' depicting the president’s Republican opponent Barry Goldwater in a cartoon-like drawing also seems to have been the model for Warhol’s more savagely confrontational image. Produced in an edition of 250, it was the only print that Warhol made with Ken Tyler at the Gemini print workshop in Los Angeles. Whereas the earlier screenprints had favoured a flat uninflected background surface, Warhol in this print and the 'Mao' (cat. 140) portraits of the same year employed screens carrying freely drawn gestural passages that became a signature of his later prints. The inclusion of visible tape marks used to adhere the photo-stencil became another feature of his screenprints from the 1970s. Warhol later complained that his 'Vote McGovern' print had so enraged the Nixon administration that he was thereafter placed under continuous scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service for tax audits, prompting him to begin his now-famous diaries as a daily log of expenditure. ('The Andy Warhol Diaries', ed. Pat Hackett, 1989; London: Penguin Books, 2010, see the entry under 3 November 1983, p. 748: ‘it was [Brooke Hayward] and Jean Stein that got me in all this IRS trouble because they’re the ones that asked me to do a McGovern poster, and I wanted to do something clever, so I got that bright idea to do a green face of Nixon with ‘Vote McGovern’ under it. And that’s when the IRS got so interested in me.’)
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
2017 9 Mar-18 Jun, London, BM, G30, The American Dream
2018 2 Jun-2 Sept, Paris, Fondation Custodia, The American Dream: pop to the present
2020-21 8 Oct-31 Jan, Madrid, La Caixa Forum, The American Dream: pop to the present
2021 2 Mar-13 Jun, Barcelona, La Caixa Forum, The American Dream: pop to the present
2021 13 Jul-14 Nov, Zaragoza, La Caixa Forum, The American Dream: pop to the present
- Acquisition date
- 2016
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 2016,7038.1
