- 219
Andy Warhol
Estimate
1,000,000 - 1,500,000 USD
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Description
- Andy Warhol
- Jackie
- signed twice on the overlap
- spray paint and silkscreen ink on canvas
- 20 1/4 by 16 in. 51.4 by 40.6 cm.
- Executed in 1964.
Provenance
Galerie 1900-2000, Paris
Pierre Cornette de Saint Cyr, Paris
Christie's, New York, November 4, 1987, lot 228
Private Collection, Los Angeles
Sotheby's, New York, February 17, 1999, lot 218
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale
Exhibited
Paris, Galerie 1900-2000, Pop Art, 1988, no. 23, illustrated in color
Literature
George Frei and Neil Printz, eds., Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 02A: Paintings and Sculpture 1964-1969, New York, 2004, cat. no. 1234, p. 231, illustrated in color
Catalogue Note
"The woman whose feelings were reproduced in all the media to such an extent that no better historical document on the exhibitionism of American emotional values is conceivable."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)
Catapulted to stardom with her husband's election as President of the United States in November 1960, Jackie Kennedy became an inspirational heroine to millions in the optimistic climate of a newly rejuvenated post-war America. Epitomizing youth, beauty and style, she became the ideal of a wife, mother and First Lady. In Jackie, 1964, she is shown during the swearing-in of Vice-President Lyndon Johnson aboard Air Force One on November 22, 1963, immediately following the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. In extraordinarily solemn grief and intimate despair, the image reveals the new widow with a blank, shocked expression as if the reality of the day's events cannot be absorbed. The image is part of a group of eight original black and white photographs Warhol selected from a variety of printed sources first published in the weeks following the assassination. "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 Exh. Cat., Houston, The Menil Collection, Andy Warhol: Death and Disasters, 1988-89, p. 29). As an entire population sank into shared grief and bereavement, Warhol began to expose the precipitous and permeating effects of the media's narration and presentation of the events.
The tension between public and private personae fascinated Warhol and directed his artistic output for much of his career. Early on, Warhol was captivated by the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Each of these celebrities possessed private turmoil and personal tragedy, while the public and media celebrated their glittering surface personae. Warhol grasped intuitively that a public image shown pervasively through the mass media was a mere artificial construct. Departing from the re-presentation of the glamorous frontal, movie-star images of Monroe and Taylor, for Jackie Kennedy, the enormity of her tragedy in 1963 personified a greater sense of national loss, and her inner trauma became her public persona. Advancing themes initiated in his famed Death and Disaster series, in his Jackie series Warhol narrates the catastrophe through the mirror of Jackie's face, relating the horror by depicting its closest witness. Jackie's mourning desolation forms the widow's shadow, holding a fading memory of her iconic husband. This traumatizing national experience, one of the earliest to be mediated by the media, is arguably also the first to be implanted in the public's consciousness by means of ubiquitous photographic images. Yet what impressed and bothered Warhol was not the actual death of the President, but "the way television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad," (Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties, New York, 1980).
One of just a handful of single canvases of Jackie Kennedy in gold, Jackie furthers Warhol's illustrated tension between public and private character. The widow's profile wrought with supreme tragedy is screened upon a painted rich, shimmering ground, a reminder of the glittering, celebrated public life of his subject. The extraordinary metallic and reflective qualities of gold held particular importance for Warhol, and outstanding highlights of the Jackie series hinge upon the predominance of the gilded color - The Week That Was I, which inaugurated the series is dominated by the color and Jackie Frieze is almost entirely gold. And yet, Warhol's use of gold was exceptionally rare: outside the Jackie works, two round Marilyns of 1962, two Ethel Sculls of 1963 and the dramatically iconic Gold Marilyn Monroe of 1962 in the Museum of Modern Art in New York are exceptional instances of gold canvases in Warhol's entire 1960s output. Jackie comes to symbolize the currency of celebrity, an icon deserving of reverential adoration and the consummate deity of Pop Art.
Catapulted to stardom with her husband's election as President of the United States in November 1960, Jackie Kennedy became an inspirational heroine to millions in the optimistic climate of a newly rejuvenated post-war America. Epitomizing youth, beauty and style, she became the ideal of a wife, mother and First Lady. In Jackie, 1964, she is shown during the swearing-in of Vice-President Lyndon Johnson aboard Air Force One on November 22, 1963, immediately following the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. In extraordinarily solemn grief and intimate despair, the image reveals the new widow with a blank, shocked expression as if the reality of the day's events cannot be absorbed. The image is part of a group of eight original black and white photographs Warhol selected from a variety of printed sources first published in the weeks following the assassination. "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 Exh. Cat., Houston, The Menil Collection, Andy Warhol: Death and Disasters, 1988-89, p. 29). As an entire population sank into shared grief and bereavement, Warhol began to expose the precipitous and permeating effects of the media's narration and presentation of the events.
The tension between public and private personae fascinated Warhol and directed his artistic output for much of his career. Early on, Warhol was captivated by the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Each of these celebrities possessed private turmoil and personal tragedy, while the public and media celebrated their glittering surface personae. Warhol grasped intuitively that a public image shown pervasively through the mass media was a mere artificial construct. Departing from the re-presentation of the glamorous frontal, movie-star images of Monroe and Taylor, for Jackie Kennedy, the enormity of her tragedy in 1963 personified a greater sense of national loss, and her inner trauma became her public persona. Advancing themes initiated in his famed Death and Disaster series, in his Jackie series Warhol narrates the catastrophe through the mirror of Jackie's face, relating the horror by depicting its closest witness. Jackie's mourning desolation forms the widow's shadow, holding a fading memory of her iconic husband. This traumatizing national experience, one of the earliest to be mediated by the media, is arguably also the first to be implanted in the public's consciousness by means of ubiquitous photographic images. Yet what impressed and bothered Warhol was not the actual death of the President, but "the way television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad," (Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties, New York, 1980).
One of just a handful of single canvases of Jackie Kennedy in gold, Jackie furthers Warhol's illustrated tension between public and private character. The widow's profile wrought with supreme tragedy is screened upon a painted rich, shimmering ground, a reminder of the glittering, celebrated public life of his subject. The extraordinary metallic and reflective qualities of gold held particular importance for Warhol, and outstanding highlights of the Jackie series hinge upon the predominance of the gilded color - The Week That Was I, which inaugurated the series is dominated by the color and Jackie Frieze is almost entirely gold. And yet, Warhol's use of gold was exceptionally rare: outside the Jackie works, two round Marilyns of 1962, two Ethel Sculls of 1963 and the dramatically iconic Gold Marilyn Monroe of 1962 in the Museum of Modern Art in New York are exceptional instances of gold canvases in Warhol's entire 1960s output. Jackie comes to symbolize the currency of celebrity, an icon deserving of reverential adoration and the consummate deity of Pop Art.