Jacqueline Kennedy

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in an open-air motorcade in Texas on November 22, 1963, the nation was transfixed by the frenzied media coverage—including the Pop artist Andy Warhol. Warhol, who began his series of celebrity portraits just a year prior, scoured newspapers and magazines for images relating to the tragedy. In the end, he found himself most inspired by eight photographs of the former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy: two photographs before the assassination that showed Jackie smiling in her iconic pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat, two that captured her grief-stricken face during the swearing in of Lyndon B. Johnson, and four more from her husband’s funeral. Over the following year, Warhol transformed these images into over 300 silkscreen paintings, often choosing palettes of blue and black to reflect the colors of the television.