Nine Jackies

Where the photographs came from, and who made them

All three began as press pictures. The Whitney's label states that Andy Warhol "appropriated newspaper photographs of Jacqueline Kennedy", and its visual description adds that he "pulled images of her directly from the newspaper, carefully cropping them to eliminate everything but Jackie's image". He then, in the museum's words, "photo-mechanically transferred the images of Jackie onto silkscreens, which were then printed onto canvas".

The catalogue raisonné of his paintings records eight source photographs behind the whole group of Jackie paintings at this size. Two show her arrival in Dallas with the president, two are profiles from the swearing-in, and four come from the funeral. Of those four, two show her veiled and two do not. The Andy Warhol Museum holds a composite sheet of those eight images, captioned with the photographers. Four are credited to Life magazine: Fred Ward, George Silk, Henri Dauman and Art Rickerby. Two are credited to the Keystone agency, and two are marked "Photographer/Source Unknown".

That list is the closest thing to an answer that exists, and it does not resolve the Whitney's three panels. No museum holding a Jackie painting names the photographer of any individual image: not the Whitney, not the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not the Walker Art Center, not the Art Institute of Chicago. The swearing-in aboard Air Force One was photographed by Cecil Stoughton, John F. Kennedy's White House photographer, and the Library of Congress catalogues his frame of it. Whether Warhol's bottom-row image is Stoughton's is not documented, and the one published attribution sheet marks those slots unknown.

The authorship question is not academic. The Whitney itself notes how far these sources were from his usual ones: they are "closely cropped, voyeuristic newspaper pictures" and they "differ from the glossy publicity stills that the artist typically used as the basis for his work". A publicity still is issued to be reprinted. A news photograph of a widow is not. In 2023 the Supreme Court took up what an artist owes the photographer he copies, in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith.

Two screens, one of them reversed

The catalogue raisonné records that the series was printed from two screens, each carrying all eight images, and that one screen was the mirror of the other. That let Warhol print any of the eight either way round, which is why heads face opposite directions between panels across the group. An invoice from the silkscreen maker dated 4 February 1964 fixes the earliest date for the series. Warhol's instruction to him survives: "Please make like in line very black and white."

The order of work was colour first, photograph second. The Andy Warhol Museum describes the method as "the process of underpainting before adding the final photographic silkscreen print", and defines registration as "the process of lining up the image on the screen to the underpainting". The coloured grounds here went on before anything was printed, and the black went over them.

The same screen produced very different panels. In the top row the black covers roughly sixty-two per cent of the left panel, forty-two per cent of the middle one and sixty-four per cent of the right one, measured across the whole panel. The bottom row reverses that order: its middle panel is the most inked of all nine, at about sixty-six per cent, and its right-hand panel the least, at about fifty-five. At the top right of each bottom-row panel the black opens into a diagonal fan of streaks where the ink gave out.

The middle row is the steady one. Its three panels sit within a value or two of each other on the ground and within about a percentage point on ink coverage. Six of the nine panels use one turquoise, the same in the top row and the bottom; what changes between them is the black laid over it.

Nine canvases, joined

Museums describe these multi-panel works as assemblies rather than single canvases. The Art Institute of Chicago gives the medium of its Twelve Jackies as "Silkscreen ink on primed linen, twelve joined canvases". The Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogues its own Nine Jackies under nine consecutive accession numbers, 1983.606.14 to 1983.606.22, and records a stretcher depth of three quarters of an inch. How the panels are fastened is not published for any of them.

The nearest published account of the problem concerns a sister work. In March 2019 the Whitney's associate conservator Matthew Skopek, with the intern Sara Kornhauser, described treating Ethel Scull 36 Times of 1963. It "looks like one giant canvas" but is "36 individual smaller ones that need to be carefully mounted together". They had been attached to four cleats, one per row, and because "most of the canvases are not quite a perfect square" the rows came out crooked. All thirty-six were removed and remounted on a single strainer.

No conservation or technical study of Nine Jackies, or of any Jackie painting, appears to have been published.

A correction to the panel measurements

The Whitney gives the work overall as 60 3/8 by 48 1/4 inches and each panel as "16 1/8 × 20 1/16 in. (41 × 51 cm)". Those two lines cannot both be read height-first. Three panels of 16 1/8 inches stacked give 48 3/8 inches, a foot short of the stated height.

Read the other way round the arithmetic works. Three panels of 20 1/16 inches stacked give 60 3/16 inches and three of 16 1/8 inches side by side give 48 3/8, which is the overall size within a fraction. Each panel therefore stands 20 1/16 inches tall and 16 1/8 inches wide.

Two further records confirm it. The museum's own visual description says "each twenty inches tall by sixteen inches wide". The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Nine Jackies gives each component as 50.80 by 40.64 centimetres, which is 20 by 16 inches in portrait format. The panel size is a module across the group: a single Jackie is 20 by 16, Twelve Jackies is three of them by four, and Sixteen Jackies is four by four.

Which Nine Jackies this is

There are two paintings called Nine Jackies, both from 1964, both three rows of three, and both about 60 3/8 inches tall. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's, accession numbers 1983.606.14 to .22, is catalogued as acrylic and silkscreen on canvas and came as a gift of Halston in 1983. The Whitney's, accession number 2002.273, is catalogued as acrylic, oil, and screenprint on linen and came from The American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., Leonard A. Lauder, President.

Warhol assembled the same panels into many other configurations: single Jackies, a triptych, Four Jackies, Twelve Jackies, Sixteen Jackies and round ones in gold paint. Auction records put the total number of Jackie paintings at 302.

1964, and how the Jackies were first shown

The Jackie paintings belong to the stretch of work Warhol made from 1962 onward in which the subject was death in public: car crashes, an electric chair, a suicide, the aftermath of a political killing. The Whitney describes Nine Jackies as combining "two of his signature themes—celebrities and fatal disasters". When the museum hung it in its 2018–19 retrospective it put it in a room with Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times of 1963, Crowd of 1963 and Saturday Disaster of 1964.

The Jackies never received an exhibition of their own. The catalogue raisonné records that forty-nine Jackie canvases went to the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in early December 1964. Warhol's Flowers exhibition was hanging in the front rooms. Forty-two of the Jackies were hung together as a single painting filling a wall in the back gallery.

Contemporary press on them is close to non-existent. The catalogue raisonné identifies one notice, in Newsweek on 7 December 1964. No named hostile review of the Jackie paintings from the 1960s has surfaced. The criticism that exists is later: Rainer Crone in 1970 called Jacqueline Kennedy "the woman whose feelings were reproduced in all the media to such an extent that no better historical document on the exhibitionism of American emotional values is conceivable".

In the Whitney's audio guide the historian John Hellmann, professor of English at Ohio State University and the author of The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of J.F.K., sets the work against the machinery that produced the images. John F. Kennedy ran for president, Hellmann says, in the first year in which nearly every American household was reported to own a television. Jacqueline Kennedy planned her husband's funeral, proposed the eternal flame at his grave, and put the riderless horse in the procession.

The museum's reading of the result is a formal one. "By using photographs from before and after the event," the label says, "Warhol created a modern history painting in which the murder of a president is unseen yet tragically present." Nothing violent is shown. The three photographs are a smile, a ceremony and a face.

How it reached the Whitney

The painting came to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002 as a gift of The American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., Leonard A. Lauder, President. Its accession number is 2002.273. It went on show almost at once, in An American Legacy, A Gift to New York, which ran from 24 October 2002 to 26 January 2003 and was curated by Marla Prather.

The museum has shown it repeatedly since. Among those displays were Pop/Concept in 2004, Full House in 2006, Artists Making Photographs in 2009, Sinister Pop in 2012–13 and Human Interest in 2016–17. It hung again in Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, from 12 November 2018 to 31 March 2019.

The museum's photograph of it was taken on 24 April 2017 by Denis Y. Suspitsyn. Andy Warhol died in 1987 and the work is in copyright; the Whitney prints "© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York" on its record. The reproduction here is shown reduced under fair use for commentary and excluded from commercial reuse.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Nine separate canvases, three rows of three, carrying three photographs of Jacqueline Kennedy — one from before her husband's assassination and two from after it. Each photograph is printed three times across its row. Start with the top row, where the same image comes out three different weights.

Detail views use the same reproduction throughout. Whitney Museum of American Art object record, 2002.273.