Andy Warhol

"The woman whose feelings were reproduced in all the media to such an extent that no better historical document on the exhibitionism of American emotional values is conceivable"

Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol, New York 1970, p. 29

Not seen in public since it was acquired from Leo Castelli in 1965, this unmatched Jackie enunciates the highest technical accomplishment in the silkscreen technique. Its execution has been judged perfectly: an even lamina of silkscreen ink scrupulously defines detail across the canvas, marking this screen print as the outstanding example in the series. Furthermore, with her face beaming that stunning smile, this is by far the most hopeful of the eight images that comprise the Jackie corpus. From the moment her husband was voted President of the United States in November 1960, Jackie Kennedy became the inspirational heroine to millions of post-war Americans as the young, beautiful and stylish paragon of a wife, mother and First Lady.  In the present work, Warhol presents this shining light in all its radiance. After the overt morbidity of the Suicides and Car Crashes of his 'Death and Disaster' series, the artist narrated the Kennedy saga through the mirror of Jackie's visage, relating the horror by depicting its closest witness.

The record of their mutual presence portends the historic tragedy that has become synonymous with the letters J.F.K. Sourced in a photo taken at Dallas airport on the morning of 22^nd November 1963, Jackie immortalises the final moment before an open-top limousine journey and a sniper's bullet devastated the emotional landscape of a nation. "Then, for the first time, there were many who experienced the banality of illustrious death, time being measured by the flash: a gasping instant" (Remo Guidieri, "JFK", in Exhibition Catalogue, Houston, The Menil Collection, Andy Warhol: Death and Disasters, 1988-89, p. 29).

Methodological skill affords the successful exposition of meaning: the description of John F. Kennedy over Jackie's right shoulder, including every detail of his smile, hairline and shirt stripes, entirely depends on the subtle manipulation of ink and pressure. Contingent on the inconsistent silkscreen process, the President's attendance is not discernible in many comparable Jackie paintings, and thus the dynamic of those images is irretrievably impaired. However, here the radiant memory of the iconic husband lingers perpetually in the wife's shadow. Warhol's exceptional aptitude to seize the most potent images of his time defines him as the consummate twentieth-century history painter. 

Kennedy's assassination on 22^nd November 1963 was followed two days later by his burial in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C. While the route of the cortege was lined by 800,000 mourners, broadcasting agencies and news editors assembled their valedictory testimonials to a hero. As an entire population sank into the shared psychosis of bereavement, the media's carefully choreographed narration precipitated one of the most prodigious critiques of mass communication ever conceived.

At some point between that November and the following February Andy Warhol scoured the popular press for portraits of Jackie Kennedy, eventually selecting eight and cropping each to about three and-a-half by three inches (see fig. ). These were cut from photographs showing the arrival of the Kennedys in Dallas; Lyndon B. Johnson's swearing-in as President on board Air Force One after the assassination; and scenes from J.F.K.'s funeral. The photo for the present work comes from page four of the 'photo history' Four Dark Days (Jim Matthews, Special Publications, Los Angeles, 1963). Warhol ordered a screen for the eight photos together in which each image was enlarged to twenty by sixteen inches, so that the entire mechanical was eighty inches high. There was also a second mechanical of the layout in reverse and the screen manufacturer was directed, "Please make like in line very black and white" to realize the highest tonal contrast and epitomise the unequivocal black and white absolutism of global fame. For this Jackie, Warhol prepared a roll of primed linen, applied a layer of phthalo blue synthetic polymer paint by hand, masked the other images on the mechanical, printed this impression in isolation and finally trimmed the canvas to size. Whereas his earliest conception of the Jackie eulogy was as a multiple, echoing his previous works of Ethel Scull, this work focuses the acclamation as a single icon. Unique in the series in showing both husband and wife, this image proves the most apt distillation of the complete narrative.

Rainer Crone, Warhol's inaugural chronicler, described Jackie Kennedy as "the woman whose feelings were reproduced in all the media to such an extent that no better historical document on the exhibitionism of American emotional values is conceivable" (Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol, New York 1970, p. 29). Confronted with the atomic conflation of celebrity and death, the progenitor of Pop - Andy Warhol - anaesthetised this zeitgeist through the effects of replication and multiplication, so undermining the manipulative potentiality of mass media. In keeping with his very best work, celebrity, tragedy and the spectre of death inhabit every pore of this screen print. This compelling Jackie masterwork remains a seminal treatise on the emotional conditioning inherent to mass culture. Warhol was disturbed by the media's potential to manipulate but simultaneously he celebrated the power of the icon. Fame and its agents intoxicated him and he understood celebrity as integral to modern life. As Remo Guidieri explains, "we need this artificiality; we probably resort to it, as Warhol perceived, out of fear of the emptiness that it both conceals and conveys" (Op Cit, p. 34).

Robert Pincus-Witten has compared the replication of Warhol's series process to a type of religious rite: "a Mass of repetition, monotonously intoned, unto the heavenly measurelessness inherent to the grid and/or serial format - the same image over and over again, stretching away to infinity" (Robert Pincus-Witten, Women of Warhol: Marilyn, Liz and Jackie, C&M Arts, New York, 2000, not paginated). Warhol's aim to de-sensitize the iconic image through repetition is invoked here because this is the flawless vestige of the Jackie canon. It also encapsulates Warhol's ethic of portraiture as a form of biography. The smiling idol of lost halcyon tranquility, Jackie Kennedy will always re-tell an epic tragedy. Georg Frei and Neil Printz have assessed how Warhol "brought her into close-up, making her the dramatic focus and emotional barometer of the Kennedy assassination, shifting the historical narrative into a series of affective moments or portraits that register the subject over time" (Georg Frei and Neil Printz, Eds., The Andy Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 2A, Paintings and Sculptures 1964-1969, London and New York 2004, p. 103). Without historical perspective and working immediately after the event, Warhol identified the media's capacity to fix this association between icon and story exceptionally early. The profuse repetition of Jackie's silk-screened portraits mirrors the shattering of moments when time stands still. Replicating a lost moment in the stark reality of tonal duality, suffused in the blue both of sadness and of the immaculate, this perfected Jackie is finally affirmed as the iconic paean to the private individual's struggle within humanity's global tragedy.