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Lot Essay
Jacqueline Kennedy's smiling face shines out from the surface of Andy Warhol's Jackie, embodying "Camelot", the dream of a new American renaissance that accompanied John F. Kennedy's election as the 35th President of the United States. Warhol based this painting on a press photograph of the First Lady, taken just hours before an assassin's bullet shattered the dream. The First Lady appears relaxed and glamorous in this intimate portrait with her pillbox hat and fur-collared coat. Marking out this screen's rare quality, we can clearly see the President over her right shoulder, smiling enthusiastically, blissfully unaware of the impending tragedy. Warhol seized upon this image, one of many of Jackie that saturated the media for days and days after the president's death. The media process fascinated Warhol, as did the ensuing frenzy and demand for national and international grief. He took this image and, with his unrivalled ability to capture the contemporary zeitgeist, turned it into an icon of an American heroine.
This particular canvas is among the most exceptional images of Jackie that Warhol ever produced. We can see the detail and quality of the transfer throughout the work's entire surface. Warhol scoured newspapers and magazines for portraits of the First Lady and eventually selected eight, which he then cropped to produce his desired aesthetic. He then ordered a screen to be made for each image, enlarging them to a finished size of 20 x 16 inches. Warhol then prepared a roll of primed linen, applied with phthalo blue acrylic, and printed each impression by hand. We can clearly see the President's face, his beaming smile and other features crisply defined, but only in a very few screens from this series, including this one. The screen's outstanding quality even allows us to discern the stripes of his shirt across his chest. The screen's rich quality combines with the transfer's strong tonal contrasts and overall consistency to produce an image of exceptional quality and power, paying fitting tribute to the strength and dignity of both the President and the woman he left behind.
The specter of glamour, tragedy and celebrity combine to make this painting one of Warhol's best, in a league with his other iconographic portraits of women such as Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor. This seminal work remains a masterpiece of Warhol's infatuation with the media and the cult of celebrity. With Jackie, Warhol adapted the formula he had already tested on Campbell's Soup and Coca-Cola for use on a celebrity, but in this case one whose image had unprecedented emotional strength. The president's glamorous widow had the intense sympathies of millions, and the death of her husband only enshrined her role as a cultural symbol. After John F. Kennedy's death, Jackie symbolized hope and sympathy for an entire nation, and while Jackie reminds us of his earlier works, it also creates a complex fusion between emotion and image, between Pop and popularity. Standing on the brink of his "Death and Disaster" series, Warhol's portrait of Jackie encapsulates celebrity's pervasive glare in the midst of personal tragedy.
This particular canvas is among the most exceptional images of Jackie that Warhol ever produced. We can see the detail and quality of the transfer throughout the work's entire surface. Warhol scoured newspapers and magazines for portraits of the First Lady and eventually selected eight, which he then cropped to produce his desired aesthetic. He then ordered a screen to be made for each image, enlarging them to a finished size of 20 x 16 inches. Warhol then prepared a roll of primed linen, applied with phthalo blue acrylic, and printed each impression by hand. We can clearly see the President's face, his beaming smile and other features crisply defined, but only in a very few screens from this series, including this one. The screen's outstanding quality even allows us to discern the stripes of his shirt across his chest. The screen's rich quality combines with the transfer's strong tonal contrasts and overall consistency to produce an image of exceptional quality and power, paying fitting tribute to the strength and dignity of both the President and the woman he left behind.
The specter of glamour, tragedy and celebrity combine to make this painting one of Warhol's best, in a league with his other iconographic portraits of women such as Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor. This seminal work remains a masterpiece of Warhol's infatuation with the media and the cult of celebrity. With Jackie, Warhol adapted the formula he had already tested on Campbell's Soup and Coca-Cola for use on a celebrity, but in this case one whose image had unprecedented emotional strength. The president's glamorous widow had the intense sympathies of millions, and the death of her husband only enshrined her role as a cultural symbol. After John F. Kennedy's death, Jackie symbolized hope and sympathy for an entire nation, and while Jackie reminds us of his earlier works, it also creates a complex fusion between emotion and image, between Pop and popularity. Standing on the brink of his "Death and Disaster" series, Warhol's portrait of Jackie encapsulates celebrity's pervasive glare in the midst of personal tragedy.