Andy Warhol

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Sale: Kornfeld and Klipstein, Bern, 9 June 1977, Lot 942
Sale: Christie's, New York, Contemporary Art, 14 November 2001, Lot 122
Dr. Kurt Abt, Basel

Georg Frei and Neil Printz, Eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Vol.2A, Paintings and Sculptures 1964- 1969, New York 2004, p. 148, no. 978, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is minor rubbing to the extreme tips of the lower right and left corners. No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light.
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With its unusual ethereal background colour which alternates between piercing sky blue and white under different light, Jackie from 1964 is a particularly rare image of the American First Lady. The first in a sequence of eight images of the Presidential wife culled by Warhol from the flood of popular press in the immediate aftermath of the John F. Kennedy assassination on 22^nd November 1963, it is one of only two images which show her face beaming with her trademark stunning smile. The source photograph, taken when the couple arrived at Dallas Airport that fateful morning with the Presidential Air Force One jet and a solitary onlooker in the background in the lower left corner, immortalises the final moments before the open-top limousine journey and the sniper's bullet that 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).  

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, elevated by the clarity of the ground colour and the impeccable quality of the silkscreen, 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. Here, the drama of unveiling events is intensified by the dramatic irony of the viewer knowing the final outcome of the day's events, Jackie's infectious smile soon to be transformed into the mourning face of the Jackie canvases that come later in the chronology, after the assassination at the swearing-in of Lyndon B. Johnson as President on board Air Force One.

The assassination was followed two days later by JFK's burial in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C. While a nation mourned the loss of a political hero, broadcasting agencies and news editors assembled their valedictory testimonials. 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.  

The majority of art histories focus on Andy Warhol as a revolutionary, the progenitor of American Pop Art, a movement that threatened the aesthetic purity of Abstract Expressionism and in so doing irrevocably altered the course of art historical tradition. And yet as the present work shows, he was also a history painter in the most conventional sense, a chronicler of his age whose oeuvre constitutes a visual anthology of almost three decades of popular history. In his catalogue essay for the first major posthumous retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Robert Rosenblum first drew attention to Warhol the history painter: "What other modern artist's work comes so close to providing a virtual history of the world in the last quarter-century?" (Robert Rosenblum, 'Warhol as Art History' in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Museum of Modern Art, Andy Warhol Retrospective, 1989, p. 27)

 

As the Jackie series demonstrates, Warhol was an astute political observer. While Abstract Expressionism had divested the canvas of everyday subjects in the pursuit of the sublime, Warhol specialised in isolating images of potent allure from his media saturated environment. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the present work. In Jackie he enshrines on canvas one of the defining moments of modern American history, in an image which is nonetheless deeply personal, revealing the private side of a very public event. Working immediately after the event without the benefit of historical perspective, Warhol identified the media's capacity to fix this association between icon and story exceptionally early. 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).

 

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). Confronted with the atomic conflation of celebrity and death, the progenitor of Pop anaesthetised this zeitgeist through the effects of replication and multiplication, so undermining the manipulative potentiality of mass media. 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. In keeping with his very best work, celebrity, tragedy and the spectre of death inhabit every pore of this compelling image.