60 years ago, Jackie Kennedy became an icon of strength to a shocked nation. Warhol’s Sixteen Jackies explores her private grief

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963 marked the death of an American icon and the end of a political era. The youth, vitality and optimism that had defined JFK’s administration had been cut short. In the words of the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy, the days of Camelot were over.

From the moment of the gunshots in Dallas to the funeral procession in Washington DC four days later, the major television networks in the United States suspended commercials and aired wall-to-wall coverage of the proceedings. Throughout the world, the media was flooded with images of the fateful day and its aftermath. Life magazine paid a reported $150,000 (more than $1.4 million in today’s dollars) for the famous Zapruder footage of the president’s motorcade, in which the assassination had been recorded on a home-movie camera.

All eyes were on Jackie, who became an icon of a nation in mourning. Amongst those watching was Andy Warhol, who had made his reputation as an artist responding to mass media spectacle. According to Warhol’s friend and studio assistant Gerard Melanga, as soon as the tragic news reached them, Warhol's only response was ‘Let's go to work!’ In the weeks following the assassination, Warhol began sifting through and collecting images of Jackie that had been published in newspapers and tabloids. The resulting series of paintings, which meditated on these widely disseminated images of the former First Lady, became an essential chapter in the artist’s Death and Disaster body of work.

Sixty years since Warhol began working with the images of Jackie Kennedy that shook America, Christie’s will offer Sixteen Jackies as part of the 20th Century Evening Sale on 9 November. The monumental painting, made up of 16 joined canvases, represents the pinnacle of Warhol’s examination into the soul of America.

In 1963 Warhol had only recently begun to realise his transformation from successful commercial illustrator to renowned Pop artist. After a couple years making paintings inflected by popular culture from Batman to Campbell’s Soup, in 1962 he began incorporating photographic silkscreen printing, elaborating on his critique of mass culture by adopting the commercial tools of reproduction into his painting process. The Jackie paintings would solidify his status as the foremost artist of American pop culture and celebrity.

In late 1963, Warhol’s then-lover and the subject of his film Sleep, the poet John Giorno, recalled watching the television coverage of Kennedy’s death with Warhol. They cried ‘great big crocodile tears while Andy said over and over again “I don’t know what it means.”’

Warhol was drawn to the iconic visage of Jackie Kennedy, ubiquitous throughout media coverage of the event. As First Lady she had epitomised beauty and glamour, known for her Chanel suits and pillbox hats in cheerful pastels. After the tragedy she came to personify the nation’s grief, stepping off Air Force One dressed in all black.

Warhol selected eight news photographs of Mrs. Kennedy as the basis for a number of works in his Jackie series. Painted in 1964, the offered Sixteen Jackies is the only work from the series that repeats the same image in a 4-by-4 grid in a monochromatic palette. The painting captures Jackie’s personal grief, together with the shock of the entire world.

The image that Warhol chose to repeat 16 times in this composition, is particularly powerful. Clipped from a photo of Jackie during the funeral procession for Kennedy, it crops into her stoic facial expression beneath a dark organdie veil. By isolating her image and further abstracting it through the silkscreen process, Warhol highlights the dichotomy of her iconic public image and her unknowable private grief.

Unlike the other five paintings that feature sixteen images of Jackie, the offered work is the only one in the series executed in a single colour. From the familiar red label of his Campbell’s Soup Cans to his gleaming Gold Marilyn Monroe, Warhol was an expert at leveraging the emotional power of colour. Here, the use of black and white echoes the original image as printed in the newspaper and also underscores the gravity of the moment depicted.

Warhol’s Sixteen Jackie sits at the pinnacle of the group of works that became known as his Death and Disaster paintings. From 1962 to 1965, the artist appropriated tabloid images of car crashes, nuclear explosions, electric chairs, race riots, poisonings and other violent events in popular culture, exploring the death and disaster that pervaded commercial messaging and mass media. In reproducing the images, often repeatedly, Warhol drew attention to the proliferation of brutal iconography in a growing multimedia world.

On the surface the Death and Disaster series ran in stark contrast to his earlier Pop works that seemed to celebrate consumer culture. They initiated a tonal shift within Pop Art, highlighting the desensitisation that accompanied the deluge of violent imagery in media. Sixteen Jackies brings the relationship between tragedy and celebrity — particularly how both are commodified in pop culture — to the fore. While many of the Death and Disaster paintings featured anonymous subjects, Jackie was and remains as identifiable an icon as Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottle and soup cans.

The repetition of the image in sequence further recalls the clicking of frames of film as they pass through a projector. Moving image became central to the investigation of the JFK assassination, with the Zapruder footage serving as a key piece of evidence. Moreover, the filmic composition of Sixteen Jackies preludes Warhol’s own hiatus from painting to focus on filmmaking in 1965.

Included in the artist’s seminal exhibition organized by the Pasadena Museum in 1970, and held in the same private collection for nearly 30 years, Sixteen Jackies captures a historic moment when time stopped and the public searched for meaning in the flow of images.