Andy Warhol - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 16, 2006 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York; Audiello Fine Art, Inc., New York

  • Literature

    G. Frei, N. Prinz and S. King-Nero, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne: Paintings and Sculptures 1964 – 1969 WARHOL 02A, pp. 159-161 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Trained as a commercial artist, Warhol began his career by producing hand-drawn images for newspaper and magazine advertisements. Initially, he focused on standard brands and product logos—Coca-Cola, Campbell’s, Brillo. Soon, however, he abandoned the freehand stencil, opting instead for mechanical production and using newspaper and tabloid clippings depicting celebrities, movie stars, and daily life as sources for his pictures. Warhol was especially seduced by the notion of the artist as a “machine” that produces art in the most casual, easy, and informal ways. He adopted the commercial photo-silkscreen technique as a method of creating mass-produced images that he subsequently printed in assembly-line fashion.

    Following President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, Warhol started silkscreening portraits of Jackie Kennedy based on published photographs of the grieving young widow. In the weeks that followed, as Warhol began to accumulate accounts of the assassination and its aftermath from newspapers, and magazines, he began to survey them for images of Jackie Kennedy, making selections for the series of paintings he was planning. Cropping up to Jackie’s face from the reproduced images, he brought her into close-up, making her the dramatic focus and emotional barometer of the Kennedy Assassination, shifting the historical narrative into a series of affective moments or portraits that register the subject over time. The current lot, Jackie-Smiling, is a foreboding portrait of Jackie in an optimistic moment smiling in the motorcade before the shots were fired. From this series of portraits we see Jackie Kennedy as the embodiment of the nation’s sorrow and an icon in Warhol’s oeuvre.

  • Artist Biography

    Andy Warhol

    American • 1928 - 1987

    Andy Warhol was the leading exponent of the Pop Art movement in the U.S. in the 1960s. Following an early career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol achieved fame with his revolutionary series of silkscreened prints and paintings of familiar objects, such as Campbell's soup tins, and celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe. Obsessed with popular culture, celebrity and advertising, Warhol created his slick, seemingly mass-produced images of everyday subject matter from his famed Factory studio in New York City. His use of mechanical methods of reproduction, notably the commercial technique of silk screening, wholly revolutionized art-making.

    Working as an artist, but also director and producer, Warhol produced a number of avant-garde films in addition to managing the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founding Interview magazine. A central figure in the New York art scene until his untimely death in 1987, Warhol was notably also a mentor to such artists as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

     

    View More Works

53

Jackie

1964
Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen.
20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm).

Estimate
$500,000 - 700,000 

Sold for $856,000

Contemporary Art Part I

16 Nov 2006, 7pm
New York