NEW YORK – Christie’s is pleased to announce Sixteen Jackies by Andy Warhol will be featured as a leading highlight in the 20th Century Evening Sale taking place on November 9, 2023. This 1964 painting depicts a 4x4 grid of a repeated press image of First Lady Jackie Kennedy taken during her husband’s funeral procession. The work will come to auction a week and a half shy of the day marking the 60th year anniversary of JFK’s death. A seminal work by the 20th century icon, Sixteen Jackies sits at the pinnacle of the group of artworks that became known as his Death and Disaster paintings. It is estimated to achieve $25 million - $35 million.

Alex Rotter, Christie’s Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art, remarks: “Sixteen Jackies captures the enormity of one of the most defining moments in American history in a uniquely Warholian way. Through the convention of reproduction, he transforms the personal grief of Jackie Kennedy into social commentary about collective trauma. This is a formal meditation on tragedy through the lens of mass media and a distillation of beauty, celebrity, shock, and sadness. Warhol's influence and impact on the contemporary landscape has continued to grow posthumously; this work stands as a testament to his enduring brilliance."

November 22, 1963, the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was shot and killed while riding in a motorcade in Texas, sitting aside his wife, Jackie. In the moments and days immediately following, hundreds of photographers documented Jackie’s every move. Thousands of snapshots were taken, transferred into print and digital images, and splashed across the media in its all forms—newspaper front pages and broadcast television.

Of the photographs taken of Jackie Kennedy during this time, Warhol selected just eight as the basis for the Jackie series. The image chosen for Sixteen Jackies is among the most powerful. It was taken as she walked at the head of the funeral procession that accompanied her husband’s body through the streets of Washington toward Arlington Cemetery, his final resting place. In this tightly cropped image of her face, Warhol ensures that our attention is focused solely on her grief. The shared sense of emotional trauma is further heightened through Warhol’s use of repetition. Through using the same image over and over again—much in the same way it was broadcast over and over again on TV and plastered across the front page of every newspaper—Warhol essentially sears Jackie’s likeness onto the world’s collective retina. The combination of stoicism, grace, and sorrow within this picture connotes not only Jackie’s emotional pain, but her incredible strength as a survivor.

This work, assembled in this arrangement by Warhol himself, is the only work from the series that repeats the same image in a 4x4 grid. Unlike the other five paintings which feature sixteen images of Jackie, this is the sole work executed in a single color palette—notably mirroring the black-and-white colorway of a newspaper. Warhol’s reaction to the death of JFK is veiled with levels of complexity reflected in the paintings it inspired. In the coming years, the implication of media as it effected perception would come to be a defining characteristic in his practice.

Sixteen Jackies is representative of the finest of Warhol and a standout from his Death and Disaster series, notably accounting for the most sought after works by the artist—including three of his top five auction prices of all time.