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Lot Essay
In his iconic Jackie series, Andy Warhol, King of Pop, captured America’s Queen Guinevere at her most distraught, yet most valiant. The present work is a single image from the series, taken from the cover of the December 6, 1963 issue of LIFE magazine, rendered in somber black and starry silver. This intimate portrait of Jackie Kennedy’s quiet resilience just weeks after her husband’s shocking death casts a spectral pallor over the glamorous First Lady’s Camelot reign, while reminding a nation in mourning of the strength it requires to carry on. Joining Warhol’s pantheon of female stars, alongside Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie, while simultaneously embodying a sense of intensity and calm dignity, stands as a tragic token of the fragility of life, and one of Warhol's most powerful memento moris.
The resolute Jackie overseeing the funeral of her assassinated husband, United States President John F. Kennedy, was already a familiar image to the American public by the time Warhol reimagined it. In what was the first significant television news event of its kind, coverage of the Kennedy tragedy spanned seventy straight hours on all three of America’s major networks. Proliferation by the media only heightened the nation’s shared grief for the unfathomable loss of a well-loved leader. As initial, visceral tears dried with time, the country was left to confront the wave of broadcasting technology that made it possible to relive the pain of other people again and again. Ever attuned with pop culture and its consequences, Warhol himself commented on such a trend: “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. What bothered me was the way the television and radios were programming everybody to feel so sad...’ (A. Warhol, quoted in P. Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties, New York, 1980, p. 60). Thanks to the incessant camera flashes of paparazzi, America peered into one woman’s personal bereavement, long after the collective implications had worn away.
To emphasize the private nature of Jackie’s experience, Warhol uses portraiture – traditionally a family affair that enabled ancestral likenesses to pass down from generation to generation. Though the source photograph includes Jackie and her children flanked by two soldiers before a pressing crowd, Warhol cut the image to isolate the widow’s great pain against the uniform’s great stoicism. Only Jackie is recognizable; while she retains her portrait features, the man behind her could be anyone. "By cropping in on Mrs. Kennedy's face, Warhol emphasized the heavy emotional toll upon her during those tragic closing days of November. The so-called Jackie portraits, far from displaying any indifference on Warhol's part to the assassination, clearly reveal how struck he was by her courage during the ordeal" (D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 181). In this way, Warhol offers an elegiac portrait to reinforce the familial relationship between the First Family and the public. The Kennedys’ suffering was America’s suffering, and only together could they be bold enough to forge forward.
In a twist characteristic of Warhol’s genius, however, this is not the unique representation that will hang over the mantelpiece in perfunctory memorial. With the mechanical action of his pioneering silkscreen process, Warhol mimicked the endless repetition of the printing press, which doused the American public with images of Jackie’s face, at both its most joyful and most bereft. By commenting on capitalism’s commodification of information, Warhol drew parallels between the abundant images of both catastrophe and consumerism, linking Jackie and his concurrent Death and Disaster series to the famous Campbell’s Soup Cans of 1962. "The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel" (A. Warhol, quoted in P. Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties, New York, 1980, p. 50). Excessive duplication erodes the power of the image until the emotional impact of event is dulled to the point of numbness. This work’s specific use of silver also inducts Jackie into Warhol’s canon of masterpieces, reveling in the dichotomy between the hollow cult of celebrity and crushing moments of mortality. “…The metallic ink surfaces, perfectly flat and devoid of any surrounding activity, render the scenes more abstract, both formally and emotionally” (Gallery label from Andy Warhol: Campbell's Soup Cans and Other Works, 1953–1967, MoMA, New York, April 25–October 18, 2015).
Thus removed from her human vulnerability and imbued instead with icon status, Warhol’s Jackie becomes a stand-in for the country’s despair, an archetype for a nation in mourning. As such, this work expressly embraces the sentiment of its time, cementing a uniquely American reaction to a defining shared experience. With his unrivaled ability to capture the contemporary zeitgeist, Warhol fashioned a secular saint for an increasingly agnostic America – a figure who endured great trial, yet emerged an emblem of hope for those in need of comfort.
The resolute Jackie overseeing the funeral of her assassinated husband, United States President John F. Kennedy, was already a familiar image to the American public by the time Warhol reimagined it. In what was the first significant television news event of its kind, coverage of the Kennedy tragedy spanned seventy straight hours on all three of America’s major networks. Proliferation by the media only heightened the nation’s shared grief for the unfathomable loss of a well-loved leader. As initial, visceral tears dried with time, the country was left to confront the wave of broadcasting technology that made it possible to relive the pain of other people again and again. Ever attuned with pop culture and its consequences, Warhol himself commented on such a trend: “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. What bothered me was the way the television and radios were programming everybody to feel so sad...’ (A. Warhol, quoted in P. Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties, New York, 1980, p. 60). Thanks to the incessant camera flashes of paparazzi, America peered into one woman’s personal bereavement, long after the collective implications had worn away.
To emphasize the private nature of Jackie’s experience, Warhol uses portraiture – traditionally a family affair that enabled ancestral likenesses to pass down from generation to generation. Though the source photograph includes Jackie and her children flanked by two soldiers before a pressing crowd, Warhol cut the image to isolate the widow’s great pain against the uniform’s great stoicism. Only Jackie is recognizable; while she retains her portrait features, the man behind her could be anyone. "By cropping in on Mrs. Kennedy's face, Warhol emphasized the heavy emotional toll upon her during those tragic closing days of November. The so-called Jackie portraits, far from displaying any indifference on Warhol's part to the assassination, clearly reveal how struck he was by her courage during the ordeal" (D. Bourdon, Warhol, New York, 1989, p. 181). In this way, Warhol offers an elegiac portrait to reinforce the familial relationship between the First Family and the public. The Kennedys’ suffering was America’s suffering, and only together could they be bold enough to forge forward.
In a twist characteristic of Warhol’s genius, however, this is not the unique representation that will hang over the mantelpiece in perfunctory memorial. With the mechanical action of his pioneering silkscreen process, Warhol mimicked the endless repetition of the printing press, which doused the American public with images of Jackie’s face, at both its most joyful and most bereft. By commenting on capitalism’s commodification of information, Warhol drew parallels between the abundant images of both catastrophe and consumerism, linking Jackie and his concurrent Death and Disaster series to the famous Campbell’s Soup Cans of 1962. "The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel" (A. Warhol, quoted in P. Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties, New York, 1980, p. 50). Excessive duplication erodes the power of the image until the emotional impact of event is dulled to the point of numbness. This work’s specific use of silver also inducts Jackie into Warhol’s canon of masterpieces, reveling in the dichotomy between the hollow cult of celebrity and crushing moments of mortality. “…The metallic ink surfaces, perfectly flat and devoid of any surrounding activity, render the scenes more abstract, both formally and emotionally” (Gallery label from Andy Warhol: Campbell's Soup Cans and Other Works, 1953–1967, MoMA, New York, April 25–October 18, 2015).
Thus removed from her human vulnerability and imbued instead with icon status, Warhol’s Jackie becomes a stand-in for the country’s despair, an archetype for a nation in mourning. As such, this work expressly embraces the sentiment of its time, cementing a uniquely American reaction to a defining shared experience. With his unrivaled ability to capture the contemporary zeitgeist, Warhol fashioned a secular saint for an increasingly agnostic America – a figure who endured great trial, yet emerged an emblem of hope for those in need of comfort.