Jackie

In stark black ink silkscreened onto a rich cerulean canvas, Jackie Kennedy beams out from the canvas in a touching moment of simple, ingenuous happiness – hours before her husband John F Kennedy would be shot while travelling in a motorcade through Dallas, Texas. Andy Warhol’s Jackie presents the tragedy of its subject with a deep personal melancholy, while continuing to examine, question and exploit the reproduction of images in post-war American media. Dating from 1964, it is one of the artist’s iconic series of Jackie portraits produced in that year, following the President’s assassination the previous November: using eight pictures sourced from Life magazine and a selection of newspapers, Warhol depicted Kennedy throughout the ordeal of her husband’s death. Beginning with two photographs showing her smiling for cameras on arriving in Dallas, Warhol then went on to show Kennedy dealing with the aftermath of this personal national disaster – shaken but statesmanlike at Lyndon Johnson’s swearing in, only hours after the assassination, and finally grieving at her husband’s funeral three days later. Though sometimes combining images within individual works, Warhol also produced single images like this one, strikingly simple emotional snapshots that are imbued with pathos by the images of the narrative that we do not see; here, the longer one looks at Kennedy’s smile, the more moving it becomes, touched by the tragic irony of what she does not know is to come.

Closely cropped to Kennedy’s face, the painting applies a forensic focus, generating emotionally penetrating portraits from the disposability of mass-media imagery; zoomed-in and blown-up, the work accentuates her strength and vulnerability in equal measure. Yet at the same time, just as his earlier Marilyn Monroe silkscreens had been, the painting also serves as an icon – a reflection of the media’s shaping influence over celebrity and identity. At once an ironic statement on this kind of modern deification and an earnestly reverent example of it, Jackie seems to mediate between Warhol’s own personal sorrow at Kennedy’s death, and his attempt to process this emotion within a system of mass media that was coercively attempting to control public feeling around the event. “When President Kennedy was shot that fall, I heard the news over the radio while I was alone painting in my studio... I’d been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart – but it didn’t bother me that much that he was dead” the artist somewhat notoriously said afterwards, but at the root of this apparent indifference was a more complicated feeling about the media: “What bothered me was the way the television and radios were programming everybody to feel so sad... It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get away from the thing” (A. Warhol quoted in A. Warhol and P. Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ‘60s, New York 1980, p. 60). Jackie perfectly expresses this complexity: a reproduction of an image that seems to do something much more profound than provide a mere simulacrum of an emotion.