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When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963, a young Andy Warhol was just beginning his ascent, exploring and finessing the themes that would define his explosive career as a Pop artist. Only one year earlier, in 1962, Warhol was first introduced to the silkscreening process and he used this newfound technique to memorialize Marilyn Monroe in the wake of her death, simultaneously studying and perpetuating the movie star's status as a sex symbol and icon of mythic proportions. In Jackie Kennedy, Warhol found an alternate female archetype to Monroe who nonetheless allowed him to significantly expand upon his obsessions with celebrity, death, and collective grief—with his Jackie series, Warhol added to these fundamental themes by invoking news media, cinematic conventions, and, arguably, a nod to religion and hagiography.

“The Jackie paintings are important because for the first time, Warhol was making portraits from newspaper and magazine images.”

“The Jackie paintings are important because for the first time, Warhol was making portraits from newspaper and magazine images,” gallerist Emmanuel Di Donna explained to Alastair Sooke for the BBC. “His previous portraits were made from publicity and news-service photos. This was the first time his portraits looked like images from a newspaper. Warhol used the news as a subject.” As the nation reeled from JFK's death, Warhol and assistant Gerard Malanga culled images from newspapers and magazines; ultimately, Warhol would select eight photographs to use as source material for his stylized portraits of the president's widow. Significantly, these selections show Jackie's countenance both before and after Kennedy's death, at different stages of mourning. As in Nine Jackies (now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art), Warhol would arrange his silkscreens in adjustable, modular configurations that evoke basic storytelling structure as well as the subversive narrative potential of the cinematic edit. Warhol made his first film, Sleep, the year prior, and film would become an important element of his creative practice.

“I now am convinced that, above all, Andy was making religious art for a secular culture.”

The present Jackie is drawn from a picture of the First Lady and her two small children at the Kennedy funeral procession, taken by Fred Ward and used as the cover for the December 6, 1963, issue of Life Magazine. Notably, the Kennedy children are wearing blue to their father's memorial, and Warhol chose a vibrant blue for Jackie; Sooke writes, "As well as being an elegiac color, appropriate for mourning, blue is the color of the Holy Virgin—and Jackie was like a contemporary, secular version of a saint, venerated by the masses." Adding to this thesis, British collector and former art dealer Anthony d’Offay offered, “Remember that Andy was brought up an Eastern Orthodox Catholic in Pittsburgh where the veneration of icons of female saints was regular practice at weekly mass. Think gold ground, flat images, repetition.” Indeed, Warhol portrayed Mrs. Kennedy this way in his Round Jackie series. As Bob Colacello, former editor of Warhol's Interview magazine, put it, “I now am convinced that, above all, Andy was making religious art for a secular culture."

Sources:

Andy Warhol, Nine Jackies, Whitney Museum of American Art

Jackie Kennedy: Andy Warhol’s pop saint, BBC