When Andy Warhol learned that President John F. Kennedy had died on November 22nd 1963, the first thing the artist said was "well, let's get to work." Warhol was fascinated by JFK's assassination and the media coverage of the event. He later observed, "It didn't bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way television and radio were programming everyone to feel so sad. It seemed no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't get away from the thing."
But Warhol did not depict the assassination of the President in his paintings. Instead, he chose to focus on the president's wife Jackie Kennedy. He picked out images of the First Lady that were taken shortly before and after her husband's death and cropped them to zoom in on her face. He then screen-printed them onto canvases. and the resulting portraits display a range of emotions—from Jackie smiling while wearing a pillbox hat, to her inscrutable expression, obscured by a black veil, on the day of her husband's funeral. Each image is on a different colored canvas and the screen printing process left some of the impressions in bold black ink, and others blurry.
Christie's is auctioning six of the Jackie paintings during its Post-War and Contemporary Morning sale on Wednesday, November 16th. The canvases were all painted over the course of 1964, and their estimates range from between $300,000 to $500,000 for a grainy portrait of the first lady during JFK's funeral, to $800,000 to $1,200,000 for a painting of Jackie smiling just hours before her husband's death. All six portraits come from a large private collection of works by Warhol that is comprised of paintings that were bought by the collector directly from the artist himself.
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Warhol painted multiple images of Jackie Kennedy throughout his career, and while many of them celebrated her as an American icon, the images of her that he created shortly after her husband's death resonate deeply with sadness, not only for the president's death but also for the commodification of the first lady's grief.
