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Lot Essay
Executed in 1964, Andy Warhol's Jackie is an intimate portrait of First Lady Jackie Kennedy, wife of President John F. Kennedy. In this particular image, the smiling First Lady appears relaxed and glamorous wearing her trademark pillbox hat. And yet, as in Warhol's pictures of Marilyn Monroe, there is a dark undercurrent to this portrait. For its context contradicts the smiling happiness of its content: this picture was taken on the morning of 22 November 1963 upon the President and First Lady's arrival in Dallas only hours before a gunshot would forever alter American history. It is this sense of inevitability that is captured in Jackie, a sense of imminent tragedy that is at odds with the open smiles of the picture itself. Through his fascination with public response to the tragedy and the frenzy of national and international grief which ensued, Warhol would soon fixate on the images of Jackie which would saturate the media for days after the death of President John F. Kennedy.
Discussing his portraits of Marilyn and other similar works, Warhol once explained that he had, 'realized that everything I was doing must have been Death... But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect' (Warhol, quoted in Andy Warhol Death and Disasters, exh. cat., Houston 1988, p. 19). This numbing that Warhol perceived as a strange facet of contemporary existence in the media age, a byproduct of the saturation of the press with the gruesome on a day-to-day basis, was briefly countered by the television channels and newspapers in the wake of Kennedy's assassination by the unleashing of a flood of imagery and coverage encouraging grief and despair to the public. And yet paradoxically it is precisely this increased and repeated exposure to the same initially shocking news or image that plays a part in immunizing the modern viewer to such traumas. In a sense, then, the incongruous, tragic, smiling face of Jackie is a reflection of our desensitized age, an opaque yet nevertheless absorbing pietà. Strangely, it is in showing the smile before the tears, the calm before the storm, that Warhol transforms a fragment of time that was for one instant banal and ordinary into a record of a pivotal moment in American history and a tangible relic of the idyllic "Camelot."
Discussing his portraits of Marilyn and other similar works, Warhol once explained that he had, 'realized that everything I was doing must have been Death... But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect' (Warhol, quoted in Andy Warhol Death and Disasters, exh. cat., Houston 1988, p. 19). This numbing that Warhol perceived as a strange facet of contemporary existence in the media age, a byproduct of the saturation of the press with the gruesome on a day-to-day basis, was briefly countered by the television channels and newspapers in the wake of Kennedy's assassination by the unleashing of a flood of imagery and coverage encouraging grief and despair to the public. And yet paradoxically it is precisely this increased and repeated exposure to the same initially shocking news or image that plays a part in immunizing the modern viewer to such traumas. In a sense, then, the incongruous, tragic, smiling face of Jackie is a reflection of our desensitized age, an opaque yet nevertheless absorbing pietà. Strangely, it is in showing the smile before the tears, the calm before the storm, that Warhol transforms a fragment of time that was for one instant banal and ordinary into a record of a pivotal moment in American history and a tangible relic of the idyllic "Camelot."