Andy Warhol

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (?)
Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles
Irving Blum Gallery, Los Angeles
John and Kimiko Powers, Carbondale, Colorado
O.K. Harris Works of Art,. New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in March 1975

Portland Art Museum, Portland Collects: Works Borrowed from Local Collectors, March - April 1973
Portland Art Museum, Contemporary American Art: A Portland Perspective, November 1984 - January 1985
Berkeley University Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, In a Different Light, January - April 1995, cat. no. 4, p. 76, illustrated in color
Portland Art Museum, Ed Cauduro Collection, September 2004 - January 2005

George Frei and Neil Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures 1964-1969, Volume 02A, New York, 2004, cat. no. 963, p. 133, illustrated in color

This work is in excellent condition. For further information, a condition report has been prepared by Terrence Mahon, Painting Conservator, New York City. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 to receive this report. The canvases are framed in a black painted wood strip frame.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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In his essay for the 1979 exhibition of Andy Warhol's portraits, Robert Rosenblum credited Warhol with the contemporary reinvention of the humanist portrait (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Andy Warhol: Portraits of the 70s, 1979, p. 9). That Warhol's unique take on portraiture emerged soon after the triumphalism of American art - namely Abstract Expressionism - is remarkable indeed, particularly given the other movement's overt supremacy within cultural institutions at the time. Out of an aesthetic deeply embedded in the formal qualities of abstraction surfaced a generation now solely attracted to the tangible. Undoubtedly, Warhol's early portraiture speaks loudly of his uncanny insight into this incipient trend and in so doing, contributes to his establishment as a protagonist in the 'cult of personality'.

Warhol's fascination with true-life events is revealed in his most profound body of work, the Death and Disaster series. Included within this body of work are some of the most controversial and visually unsettling images of our time: mortality is desensitized to a hitherto unknown degree through de-contextualized and serialized imagery. Ranging from car and plane accidents, to race riots, and suicides, these works reveal a Warhol, who, like a new personification of the nineteenth-century dandy, observes, records, and illustrates the often tragic world around him. Paradoxically, these are also some of the most historically pressing images of the era where the pertinence of the physical world, of the here and now, takes center stage.

Among the Death and Disaster images, Four Jackies embodies human tragedy at its most elemental state. The side-by-side presentation of the vertically paired panels alludes to a sequence of chronological events. Depicted on the left is the outline portrait of Mrs. Kennedy during the swearing-in of Vice-President Lyndon Johnson aboard Air Force One on November 22^nd, 1963; and on the right, an image taken during the state funerary procession of President Kennedy on November 24^th, 1963. The two source images are part of a group of eight original black and white photographs first published in a variety of printed sources in the weeks following the assassination. This traumatizing national experience, one of the earliest to be mediated by the media, is arguably also the first to be implanted in the public's consciousness by means of ubiquitous photographic images. Yet what impressed and bothered Warhol was not the actual death of the President, but "the way television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad." (POPism: The Warhol '60s, by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, 1980.)

Whether apocryphal or not, Warhol's apparent insensitivity does not compromise his very real appropriation of photographic images as means to subvert all prior painting conventions, especially those which required originality and the direct intervention of the artist's hand. Appropriation has an established tradition in the history of modern art. Indeed, one may argue that Warhol's dependency on photography for his celebrity portraits may parallel - in the most conceptual sense - Braque and Picasso's appropriation of flat materials for papier collé pictures at the turn of the last century.

Unlike traditional renditions of highly publicized political or entertainment figures that portray the outer countenance and mask the inner personality, Jacqueline Kennedy, was portrayed in Four Jackies both in extraordinarily solemn grief and intimate despair. The image in the left panels portrays the new widow with a blank, shocked expression as if the reality of the day's events cannot be absorbed. Private emotions overwhelm the instinct for public presentation. In the right panels, as the female embodiment of America's Camelot, she is the very image of public decorum during the funerary ceremonies and rites: "worthy of a Roman widow". (Ibid., Robert Rosenblum, p. 9).  As subject matter, the First Lady was certainly replete with cultural implications and in Four Jackies, the multiplicity of panels allows Warhol to portray Jackie as a document of human events, capturing all of their tragedy. A living legend, she carried the hopes of an era keenly aware of an imminent cultural shift. And yet in the midst of immense public pain, Warhol manages to also present Mrs. Kennedy as a dignified approachable figure; in a single work she is both a mournful spouse and a pillar of dignity for a grieving nation.

Underneath these opposing layers of meaning, lay Warhol's attempt to create an 'art of the machine'. He uses two devices for this endeavor: as noted earlier, an unadulterated approach to the subject matter; and the mechanical technique of a silk screen where mimesis is secondary to historical presence. Within the group of magnum opus portraits to which Four Jackies belongs, the artist carried his theme of the machine product to its "logical, if disquieting, conclusion - people as machine products, commercial property.'' (Paul Bergin, ``The Artist as Machine'', Art Journal 26, Summer 1967, p. 361)  While this view is consistent with Warhol's self-described disregard for emotional narratives, it is difficult not to ascribe a psychological component to this particular celebrity picture. The shadow of a human emotion, no matter the degree of personal detachment by the artist, remains in it. Today, the images of Four Jackies have evolved into one of the most identifiable contemporary portraits of the 20^th century. The cult of celebrity and the achievement of mechanical reproduction find their maximum expression in a painting that subtly touches upon the themes of the Death and Disaster series.