Jackie Triptych
Andy Warhol
ANDY WARHOL, 1964. ACRYLIC PAINT, SILKSCREEN INK AND SPRAY PAINT ON LINEN.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Andy Warhol turned his, the nations, and Jackie’s pain into art. Dissatisfied with the media coverage, and acutely aware of the symbol that Jackie Kennedy was becoming, without agency or choice, Warhol re-enacted the event over and over again by silk-screening images of the grieving Kennedy taken from Life magazine. The work is at once compassionate and detached; by focusing on the first lady’s face, he emphasis and reminds us of her bravery, her courage and her grief, but he also participates in the process of removing her humanity and making her become an image, a representation of the nation and a historical event. Warhol, in 1964, was only beginning to get to grips with the new art of screen-printing, having started less than two years earlier. The Jackie works marked a turning point, as he realised the power of a repeatable medium, and how the images that were flooding public consciousness could be replicated, distorted and recontextualised to speak to a wider idea permeating the culture.