Andy Warhol

Private Collection, United Kindgom (acquired directly from the artist circa 1967)

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the tonality of the paper tends more towards cream in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Each sheet is affixed verso to an additional sheet for support, which is reversible (please refer to the department for an external treatment report). Each sheet has light handling creases and further handling marks in places with very light wear to the extreme outer edges. As per the catalogue illustration: (i) there is light wear to the outer edges. (ii) there is a tiny tear to the lower left corner tip, which has been stabilised to the supportive sheet beneath.(iv) there is a 5cm vertical repaired tear towards the centre of the lower edge. There are a few spots of light media accretion to the figure's face.
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Capturing one of Andy Warhol's most iconic subjects in five different images, the present lot traces the key moments around one of the most tragic yet defining events in post-war American history. The assassination of President J.F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963 is firmly ingrained in the collective American consciousness. The unprecedented amount of attention was given to this traumatic event by the media, and assumed a dominant place in American day-to-day life. But perhaps even more significantly was the representation of this tragedy, manifested in Jackie Kennedy, who, as the popular icon of youth, beauty and style, as well as the ideal wife, mother and First Lady, became the national symbol of mourning over the days following her husband’s death. The intense media coverage of Jackie's public and private life made her image the ideal subject for Warhol, whose critical practice explored the effects of mass media and the intersections of simultaneous success and tragedy; of fame and death.  

The present lot comprises five of the eight images that Andy Warhol carefully selected from popular media reports of the event, all of which were taken after the assassination: one shows Jackie immediately after her husband’s death, still wearing the blood-stained pink suit that she wore when she sat next to him earlier that morning; the other four images were taken during the funeral where she is first seen wearing a dark veil, and later accompanied by an escort. Even before Warhol appropriated these images from the newspapers, Jackie had already come to be at the absolute centre of attention of the American media. Rainer Crone aptly concluded that during the period following Kennedy’s death, she became: "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 only have these images of Jackie become synonymous with this most fateful moment in American history, but they are also amongst the most important of Warhol's iconic representations women: together with Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy has become one of the most recognisable faces of Andy Warhol's influential oeuvre, and indeed of the Pop Art generation at large. And as for most people in the 1960s, “Marilyn, Liz and Jackie were not simply “women” (...), they were stars and goddesses” (Robert Pincus-Witten, Women of Warhol: Marilyn, Liz & Jackie, New York 2000, n.p.). Indeed, as the embodiment of Pop Art, Warhol's silkscreens of Jackie are highly important historical documents, and have found their way into such prestigious public collections as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 

Warhol's genius laid not only in recognising the fame and pictorial power of these three women, but in acknowledging the tragic nature of their fame, which was inextricably linked to stories of death. As in his most acclaimed work from the 1960s, the artist's choice of subject matter reveals a critical attitude towards the influence of mass media, as in the artist's famous Death and Disaster series of the same decade. The images of Jackie are inextricably linked to the death of her husband, Marilyn Monroe tragically committed suicide and Liz Taylor had to fight a life-threatening battle against pneumonia – all of which happened whilst they were under the spotlight of the media. This darker side of popular culture, in which public and private life becomes under intense media scrutiny and in which one’s representation becomes all-important, were at the centre of Andy Warhol’s major work of the 1960s. 

The incredible importance of Warhol’s image of Jackie Kennedy – both as an art-historically iconic representation of the influential Pop art generation and as a crucially important document of a key moment in American history – is masterfully captured in the present five Jackies. Perfectly embodying Warhol’s unparalleled ability to capture the essence of a generation with his signature economy of means, these iconic silkscreens "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” (Georg Frei and Neil Printz, Eds., The Andy Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 2A, Paintings and Sculptures 1964-1969, London and New York 2004, p. 103).