1964

Jackie (Four Jackies) (Portraits of Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy)

American, 1928 - 1987

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Andy Warhol chose photographs used in media accounts before and after the event and cropped them to focus on the president's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy. The artist often employed this unorthodox approach to portraiture, appropriating photographs of celebrities from magazines and newspapers to reinforce an individual's public image rather than creating his own artistic interpretation of a sitter's inner character. Here, the combination of four pictures brilliantly condenses and intensifies the numbing effects of the mass media coverage that shaped the nation's experience of this shared tragedy.