[JustGamerS]

Early in 1964, Warhol began silk-screening these photographs onto pre-coloured grounds. Between May and November, he made more than 300 Jackie paintings. Many of them measured 20in by 16in (51cm by 41cm) individually, and could be arranged in various combinations to form larger, gridded compositions. Today they range in price from $1.2m to tens of millions of dollars for the multiple portraits. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of their creation, the Blain Di Donna gallery in New York has brought together more than 20 of the paintings in the first exhibition to focus solely on this series. more

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Warhol created several ‘Round Jackies’ in which the First Lady appears against a background spray-painted gold. But the influence of what he witnessed in church as a boy may also explain why so many of the Jackie portraits are different shades of blue. As well as being an elegiac colour, appropriate for mourning, blue is the colour of the Holy Virgin – and Jackie was like a contemporary, secular version of a saint, venerated by the masses.

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(Courtesy of Blain DiDonna/The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc)

[Mark Petrov]

This is certainly how Warhol’s close associate Bob Colacello, who edited Interview magazine, which the artist founded, understands the Jackie portraits. “I now am convinced that, above all, Andy was making religious art for a secular culture,” he writes in the catalogue accompanying the Blain Di Donna exhibition. With his portraits of Marilyn and the film star Elizabeth Taylor, “[Warhol’s] trilogy of saints – two Magdalens and a Holy Virgin – was complete.”

[zmauricepittmanj]

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in an open-air motorcade in Texas on November 22, 1963, the nation was transfixed by the frenzied media coverage—including the Pop artist Andy Warhol. Warhol, who began his series of celebrity portraits just a year prior, scoured newspapers and magazines for images relating to the tragedy. In the end, he found himself most inspired by eight photographs of the former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy: two photographs before the assassination that showed Jackie smiling in her iconic pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat, two that captured her grief-stricken face during the swearing in of Lyndon B. Johnson, and four more from her husband’s funeral. Over the following year, Warhol transformed these images into over 300 silkscreen paintings, often choosing palettes of blue and black to reflect the colors of the television. more

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The Jackie paintings were produced as elements in a series that can be arranged in various permutations, such as grids, friezes, triptychs, diptychs or singles with mixed, repeated or inverted imagery. Warhol: Jackie will present several key examples of these combinations with loans from the Sonnabend Collection, The Andy Warhol Museum and important private collections. [links]

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The exhibition begins with the paintings of Jacqueline Kennedy on the day of JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963, from the smiling Jackie arriving at Dallas Love Field, through the motorcade, to the administration of the oath for the new President Johnson on Air Force One, and finally, at the funeral, as she transforms from glamorous and iconic First Lady to grieving widow. Warhol cropped images taken from Life Magazine and silkscreened them on to canvas. By cropping her face and repeating it, Warhol focused on Jackie’s grief and courage. The news was a unifying force during the President’s assassination as people repeatedly watched and read about the events of that week. Warhol gives us a reenactment of this tragic moment in America’s history through Mrs. Kennedy’s powerful image. here

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Deeply affected by the media coverage of JFK’s assassination, Warhol began the Jackie series in February 1964, continuing the Death and Disaster theme of his first European exhibition with Ileana Sonnabend in Paris, in January of that year. more

[Cdecker]

Blain|Di Donna is delighted to announce an exhibition of portraits by Andy Warhol of the late First Lady, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, on view in New York from April 10 – May 17, 2014. Bringing together over fifty paintings grouped in approximately twenty individual works, this exhibition will be the first to focus exclusively on this important body of work created fifty years ago, marking the formative period in the development of Warhol’s work, most notably the silkscreen technique, to produce serial imagery paintings based on images from magazines and newspapers. The exhibition will illustrate Warhol’s career-long exploration of contemporary media culture, such as the news, serial imagery, celebrity and death.

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Warhol: Jackie has been curated in close collaboration with Bibi Khan, former curator of the Andy Warhol Foundation; it will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an introduction by Bob Colacello, writer, former Warhol associate, and an essay by Judith Goldman, writer, former Whitney Museum curator and noted Warhol expert.

[PulsedMedia]

Even though the subject of the painting is recognizable, 16 Jackies embodies Danto’s argument that, “in non-imitational painting what is shown lacks an original, and so stands in no causal connection with an original. . . Once we relax the causal side of representation, we are left only with vehicle, denotation, and whatever is shown; and it is then up to the artist what sort of thing he wishes to show.”[5] This is a work of art about grief and pain, Mrs. Kennedy is but the vehicle that Warhol uses to convey the message. here

[mizerydearia]

[3] Arthur Danto, “Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1974)” “That they stand at a distance from reality, and that they accordingly locate those who understand them in their own terms at a distance from reality, begins to be an explanation of the philosophical pertinence of artworks.” 142

[jenifrer]

[2] Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp (1964; reprinted in essay collection, Against Interpretation, 1966). “Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric — something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.”

[PulsedMedia]

Warhol’s use of an image repeated multiple times reduces the meaning of the image per se, but reinforces the meaning of the work of art. This strange interplay allows the viewer and the community of interpreters to craft a narrative for the work that draws from its popular roots and popular sentiment. The images are of Jackie Kennedy both as a “First Lady” and as a grieving widow, yet the merging of these photos and their repetition allows for the situation (the assassination of the President) to overlay the entire piece. It is a portrait of a person, but moreso a commentary on a point in time. The connotation of the work is relevant today, but its emotional impact is diminished. At the time, Jackie Kennedy was the nation’s visible reminder of grief, of civility, of tragedy, and this subtext remains with the work, however the immediacy of the emotion has weakened over time. here

[vroycehesterb]

Warhol’s use of a single color (blue) over a background of black, white and gray evokes a somber atmosphere. This atmosphere is in stark contrast with Warhol’s Monroe or Elvis portraits. In 16 Jackies there is no garish repainting or excessive motion, she is not tragic figure by dint of her own elevation and fall, but by tragedy itself. This difference highlights the contrast between icons of popular culture by popular culture (movie star and rock star) and the icon thrust into the spotlight by circumstance. Warhol by use of independent colors over photographs creates a commentary on the subject, and establishes a known lexicon with the viewers of his art. [links]