Andy Warhol strove to turn Mao Zedong into a superstar in the West, even as the leader waged a Cultural Revolution across China.

While Warhol rocketed to stardom in the 1960s by painting the cultural aristocracy of the Western world, his work took a radical turn in 1972, when he started a sequence of portraits of the Chinese revolutionary.

The artist blew up a photograph contained in Mao's "Little Red Book," transferred the image to an array of canvases, and transformed the leader by applying the same wild, vibrant blocks of paint he had deployed to remake actress Marilyn Monroe.