.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Alongside his depictions of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, Andy Warhol’s portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy have become some of the most iconic images of the twentieth century. Warhol created these works in the wake of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963: a seismic event that changed the course of American history, and brought the First Lady into his pantheon of tragic heroines. He made silkscreens from eight different photographs taken before the event and in its aftermath, cropping them closely to Jackie’s face and printing them on monochrome grounds. Jackie (1964) is based on one of two images he chose from the morning of the fateful day. Jackie smiles as the couple arrive in Dallas. In deep black on a primed white canvas, her features become stark and poignant. The texture of her famous pink bouclé hat fades into the background, and the uneven silkscreen leaves a ghostly trace through her hair. It is a picture of a secular saint, and of the death of an American dream.
Warhol’s photo-silkscreens—which he had started making in 1962—looked unflinchingly at popular culture’s obsessions with fame, sex and tragedy. He had first portrayed Marilyn Monroe in August 1962, a week after her death; his pictures of Elizabeth Taylor followed her hospitalisation and tabloid scandals of 1961 and 1962. Throughout 1963 he was at work on some of the darkest of his ‘Death and Disaster’ series, depicting newspaper images of car crashes and suicides. The assassination of JFK brought these themes to a climax. In the television age, a national catastrophe was played out across the globe for the first time, reaching millions of viewers. The First Lady—already a glamorous media goddess—was admired for her dignity and grace throughout the ordeal. Captured by the cameras, her personal grief entered the realm of legend.
Working with his assistant Gerard Malanga, Warhol collected photographs of Jackie from newspapers and magazines over the following weeks. He chose eight of them: two of her arrival in Dallas, two at the swearing-in of Lyndon B. Johnson on Air Force One later that day, and four at the state funeral, two veiled, two unveiled. The images together have a narrative quality, registering different moments like Stations of the Cross. Through Jackie’s features, they dramatise the shock, grief and anxiety that gripped the world. Warhol himself claimed to have been less perturbed by the assassination than by the overwhelming media response. ‘I’d been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart—but it didn’t bother me that much that he was dead’, he said. ‘What bothered me was the way the television and radios were programming everybody to feel so sad. It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get away from the thing’ (A. Warhol quoted in P. Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s, New York 1980, p. 60).
Warhol’s outpouring of Jackies can be seen to parallel the relentless visual coverage he described. Between May and November 1964 he created diptychs, triptychs and large grids of multiple canvases, as well as single images like the present work. Their flickering, filmic quality echoed his own forays into experimental moviemaking at the time. While the Jackies were never shown as a series, a grid of forty-two paintings were debuted at the Castelli Gallery in November 1964, almost exactly a year after Kennedy’s death. They were hung in a back room, inflecting the Flowers on show in the main gallery with a memorial quality. ‘The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel’, Warhol said (A. Warhol quoted in P. Hackett, ibid., p. 50). Isolated images of Jackie such as the present work, however, retain their own haunting and singular power. As he had for Liz and Marilyn, Warhol drew upon the Catholic icons of his upbringing to canonise his subject, enshrining her forever as an object of public and private devotion.
Warhol’s photo-silkscreens—which he had started making in 1962—looked unflinchingly at popular culture’s obsessions with fame, sex and tragedy. He had first portrayed Marilyn Monroe in August 1962, a week after her death; his pictures of Elizabeth Taylor followed her hospitalisation and tabloid scandals of 1961 and 1962. Throughout 1963 he was at work on some of the darkest of his ‘Death and Disaster’ series, depicting newspaper images of car crashes and suicides. The assassination of JFK brought these themes to a climax. In the television age, a national catastrophe was played out across the globe for the first time, reaching millions of viewers. The First Lady—already a glamorous media goddess—was admired for her dignity and grace throughout the ordeal. Captured by the cameras, her personal grief entered the realm of legend.
Working with his assistant Gerard Malanga, Warhol collected photographs of Jackie from newspapers and magazines over the following weeks. He chose eight of them: two of her arrival in Dallas, two at the swearing-in of Lyndon B. Johnson on Air Force One later that day, and four at the state funeral, two veiled, two unveiled. The images together have a narrative quality, registering different moments like Stations of the Cross. Through Jackie’s features, they dramatise the shock, grief and anxiety that gripped the world. Warhol himself claimed to have been less perturbed by the assassination than by the overwhelming media response. ‘I’d been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart—but it didn’t bother me that much that he was dead’, he said. ‘What bothered me was the way the television and radios were programming everybody to feel so sad. It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get away from the thing’ (A. Warhol quoted in P. Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s, New York 1980, p. 60).
Warhol’s outpouring of Jackies can be seen to parallel the relentless visual coverage he described. Between May and November 1964 he created diptychs, triptychs and large grids of multiple canvases, as well as single images like the present work. Their flickering, filmic quality echoed his own forays into experimental moviemaking at the time. While the Jackies were never shown as a series, a grid of forty-two paintings were debuted at the Castelli Gallery in November 1964, almost exactly a year after Kennedy’s death. They were hung in a back room, inflecting the Flowers on show in the main gallery with a memorial quality. ‘The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel’, Warhol said (A. Warhol quoted in P. Hackett, ibid., p. 50). Isolated images of Jackie such as the present work, however, retain their own haunting and singular power. As he had for Liz and Marilyn, Warhol drew upon the Catholic icons of his upbringing to canonise his subject, enshrining her forever as an object of public and private devotion.