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ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987) JACKIE (TWO WORKS) right panel: stamped with Estate and Foundation seals ...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:400,000.00 - 600,000.00 USD
ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987) JACKIE (TWO WORKS) right panel: stamped with Estate and Foundation seals ...
ANDY WARHOL
(1928-1987)
JACKIE (TWO WORKS)
right panel: stamped with Estate and Foundation seals and numbered "PA 56.069"
on the overlap; numbered again
on the stretcher
left panel: stamped with Estate and Foundation seals on the reverse and again on the overlap, numbered "PA 56.082" on the overlap and again on the stretcher
synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas
201/2 x 16 in. (50 x 40.6 cm) each
executed in 1964
ESTIMATE: $400,000-600,000
PROVENANCE
The Estate of Andy Warhol,
NEW YORK
In the early1960s, television and the media exerted a tremendous amount of influence on the way in which the mass public viewed the world around them. President John F. Kennedy raised the spirits of America and Europe by becoming the first television President. The public identified with him and his dynamic, youthful and glamorous First Family, whom they became intimately and personally familiar with through magazines, newspapers and especially television. The death and funeral of President Kennedy was by far the most extensively covered media event of the time. Millions of viewers watched the internationally televised funeral procession for the assassinated President, and his widow, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, became a symbol of national mourning.
Warhol exploited both style and the media with his devotion to the aesthetic of television, society columns and fan magazines. He demonstrated that a persona could be communicated via the media better than an art object ever could. Warhol exploited both the media and style, and in so doing, he exposed contemporary society's values with subversive and uncomfortable candor. To Warhol, fame was essentially without meaning in a world of interchangeable images. As Rainer Crone notes "...his work forces us to look critically at every form of visual communication-the class-dependent and exclusive easel painting as well as the communications media designed for mass distribution and consumption" (Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol, New York, 1970, p. 23).
The portraits that Warhol made of Jackie Kennedy following her husband's horrible death and burial conflated the massive themes of celebrity, media and death so prominent in the artist's work at the time. Warhol was exploring the relationships between disaster and death, the American tendency to elevate media stars to "royal" status, and the effects of alienation created by the realism of visual content.
In discussing the Jackie portraits, one of Warhol's most powerful and successful series, Rainer Crone writes: "These were all done shortly before, during, and shortly after the murder of John F. Kennedy, Jr. in November, 1963, and show 'The Week That Was' mirrored in the face of the woman whose feelings were reproduced in all the media to such an extent that no better historical document on the exhibitionism of American emotional values is conceivable: The Week That Was-the emotions of mourning become object. Repetition serves only to strengthen this impression" (Rainer Crone, op. cit., p. 29).
Warhol first portrayed Jacqueline Kennedy in 1962 as one of his "star" portraits, a series that stemmed from his frontal depictions of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Turner and Troy Donahue. Following John F. Kennedy's assassination, he made 16 different images of the head of Jacqueline Kennedy using eight newspaper photographs, which he also reversed. Each picture was painted silkscreen on canvas, and sized 20 x 16 inches.
David Bourdon notes: "Warhol derived his powerful portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy from news photographs taken before and after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas in November 1963. The 'before' photographs portray the smiling First Lady, wearing her famous pill-box hat, as she sits with her husband in the backseat of the car during the motorcade. The next photograph shows Mrs. Kennedy standing hatless beside Lady Bird and Lyndon Johnson, as he is being sworn in as President aboard Air Force One before flying back to Washington. The remaining 'after' photographs in the series present the grieving widow in mourning attire during the funeral ceremonies in Washington" (David Bourdon, Andy Warhol, New York, 1981, p. 181).
Barbara Rose writes of the importance of Warhol's portraits: "The irony of this mirror-image of the nightmare that the American Dream had become, in an age of rampant commercial exploitation and affluence, escaped most of the noveau-riche collectors who rejoiced in owning the art that mocked them. But then, neither did Charles IV and his court realize what Goya was doing to their likenesses. Certainly Warhol's grotesque portraits of his patrons, playing up every feature of their vacuous narcissism, his grotesquely made-up Marilyn Monroe and tearful Jackie Kennedy will stand as an indictment of American society in the sixties as scathing as Goya's merciless portraits of the Spanish courts" (Barbara Rose, "The Sixties," American Painting: The Twentieth Century, Geneva, 1969, pp. 89-116).