Andy Warhol

Private Collection, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1974

This painting is in excellent condition. There is scattered slight wear to the corner tips as is typical of Warhol's work. There is also some minor loss to the overturn edge in a thin horizontal area along the bottom edge stretching 1 ¼" in from the bottom left corner. There is also a pinpoint size white accretion located 2 ¾" in from the left and 5 ¾" up from the bottom. Under ultraviolet light there are no apparent restorations. The canvas is unframed.
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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Wielding his autographic tools of silkscreen and acrylic paint, Andy Warhol created a corpus of works that together memorialize a particular zeitgeist in popular culture in mid-century America. Executed in 1964, at the very heart of Warhol’s most celebrated period, Jackie is a poignant and brilliantly rendered distillation of the core tenets of his aesthetic focus: death and celebrity. Existing as a paragon of the halcyon era in Warhol’s prodigious career, Jackie is thereby situated as an indisputable icon of the golden age of Pop Art, over which the artist reigned supreme. Epitomizing the moment when Warhol's work advanced from the cosmopolitan avant-garde to become a global phenomenon, the present work is central to his revolutionary iconography, which has so fundamentally shaped the development of visual culture ever since. Brimming with artistic genius and conceptual economy, this work encapsulates the allure of unlimited celebrity, critiques the manipulative power and replicating effects of mass-media, and is a groundbreaking response to one of the most tragic moments of twentieth-century American history.

Like Warhol’s seminal series of Electric Chair paintings, which confront us with the portentous anticipation of impending tragedy, Jackie’s beaming visage is particularly affecting as the immediate precursor to a cataclysmic event in modern history. Sourced from a photograph taken at Dallas Love Field airport on the morning of 22^nd November 1963,  Jackie immortalizes the final moments before an open-top limousine journey and a sniper's bullet devastated the emotional landscape of a nation. "Then, for the first time, there were many who experienced the banality of illustrious death, time being measured by the flash: a gasping instant." (Remo Guidieri, "JFK", in Exh. Cat., Houston, The Menil Collection, Andy Warhol: Death and Disasters, 1988, p. 29) The artist had previously included the charismatic and stylish Jackie at the height of her newfound celebrity as First Lady in his 1962 pantheon of iconic goddesses along with Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, portraying them in lushly saturated colors and frontal movie-star poses. For Warhol, celebrity was a fascinating contradiction between the hidden identity of the private individual and the superficial nature of public fame and, like Marilyn and Liz, the enormity of Jackie’s private struggle and loss, brazenly exploited by the machine of mass media, conjoined her inner trauma and outer identity, creating a more complicated persona perfectly suited to his artistic project. Moreover, the gleam of commercial prosperity and ascendant youth, as personified by his early celebrity portraits, was only the surface of American life in the 1960s, masking the brutalities of accidental tragedy, racial unrest, or capital punishment. Warhol seized upon the historical moment of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and its media saturation as an ideal subject; for him it served as an indication that America’s armor of glamour and promise had cracked. The events of November 1963 were a searing time whose televised and print coverage brought images to the public consciousness that remain undeniably vivid and potent today, fifty years later, when viewing Jackie. 

Warhol's Pop idiom was rooted in the pervasive nature of the everyday, but he deployed this as an ambiguous prism for the more astonishing or disturbing elements of our time. Perfectly symbolizing the currency of celebrity and an icon deserving reverential adoration, Warhol's Jackie becomes the consummate deity of Pop art. The smiling archetype of lost bucolic tranquility, literally a vestige of Camelot, Jackie Kennedy will always re-tell an epic tragedy. Jackie's silk-screened portraits mirror the shattering of moments when time stands still: replicating a lost moment in the stark reality of tonal duality, this Jackie is the epochal paean to an individual's struggle with disaster and, as such, is situated at the very highest levels of Warhol’s pantheon of celebrity portraiture.