Round Jackie,

1964

Warhol’s fascination with celebrity and with death converges in these two virtually identical portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy. Here, he focuses on her smiling face as she greeted crowds in Dallas, Texas, shortly before the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, on November 22, 1963. Early in 1964, Warhol began screenprinting photographs of the event onto painted grounds, making more than three hundred portraits of Jackie that year. He printed this image on eight small, round gold spray-painted canvases, each called Round Jackie. While the grainy imperfections in the canvases evoke the texture of tabloid photography, the gold spray paint recalls the religious icons of Christian saints and Madonnas that Warhol saw in the Eastern Orthodox churches of his native Pittsburgh. The round format was unusual in Warhol’s work; the artist may have been invoking ancient gold coins with profiles of rulers and deities.