Andy Warhol

Artespansione, Rome
Acquired by the present owner in 1975

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly lighter in the original. Condition: This work is in good condition. As to be expected with works of this nature, there are some very small losses to the corner tips and at intervals to the extreme overturn edges; and there is some very minor variation in the surface quality of the upper black areas, consistent with the artist's silk-screening process. There is a minute scratch and associated very small loss to the top of the nose, and one towards the centre of the extreme bottom edge, and the canvas has been restretched. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals a minute spot of fluorescence to the left of the eye.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

"The woman whose feelings were reproduced in all the media to such an extent that no better historical document on the exhibitionism of American emotional values is conceivable"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

Andy Warhol's Jackie dates from the height of the artist's most celebrated period and combines the groundbreaking themes of both his 'Death and Disaster' canon and his contemporaneous fascination with celebrity culture. This work fulfils Warhol's key artistic philosophy that the re-presentation and multiplication of popular images initiates a fundamental reappraisal of their meaning and potential. It is directly related to the monumental Thirty-Five Jackies, now in the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, which enlists the same image of Jackie Kennedy aboard Air Force One during the presidential inauguration of Lyndon B. Johnson, immediately following the assassination of her husband JFK. The idol of lost halcyon tranquillity and vestige of so-called Camelot, Jackie Kennedy's grieving countenance will always re-tell an epic tragedy and through the remote objectivity of the silkscreen Warhol's Jackie documents the stunned, disbelieving, shocked and tragic visage of the United States' First Lady. With the most brilliant artistic innovation, this work encapsulates the allure of unlimited celebrity, critiques the manipulative power and replicating effects of mass-media, and is a profound response to one of the most tragic moments of twentieth-century American history.

The source image that provided the template for this canvas belonged to a sequence of eight images of the Presidential wife culled by Warhol from the flood of popular press in the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination on 22^nd November 1963. Having pursued a successful career in magazine illustration and advertising during the 1950s, Warhol's brilliant invention here lies in editing and cropping the perfect image to encapsulate the entire narrative of an open-top limousine journey and a sniper's bullet that devastated the emotional landscape of a nation. Jackie immediately and efficiently narrates America's sudden, violent loss and deep shock: "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, Warhol replicates 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 retold the Kennedy saga through the mirror of Jackie's portrait, relating the horror by depicting its closest witness. 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 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 reaction precipitated the Jackie corpus: 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 history. 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 was obsessed by isolating images of potent allure from his media saturated environment. With Jackie he enshrines on canvas one of the defining moments of modern American history in a repeated image which is nonetheless deeply personal, revealing the private side of a very public event. Working immediately after the event with very little historical perspective, Warhol identified the media's capacity to fix this association between icon and story.

Georg Frei and Neil Printz have assessed how Warhol brought Jackie "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 Warhol 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 artist anaesthetised this zeitgeist through the effects of replication and multiplication, so undermining the manipulative potentiality of mass media. This compelling work will always remain 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.