Portraits of Jackie Kennedy displayed at Blain/Di Donna

[Image above: Andy Warhol, Nine Jackies. 1964, The Sonnabend Collection, on long-term loan to Ca' Pesaro, International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice, Italy, Nina Sundell and Antonio Homem © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / ARS, New York, Source image on image no. 1 and 9: photograph Henri Dauman, 1963.]

NEW YORK, NY - Andy Warhol made portraits of the late First Lady, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, which will be displayed at Blain|Di Donna in New York, starting April 10 and lasting until May 17, 2014.

Bringing together over fifty paintings, this exhibition will be the first to focus exclusively on this important body of work created fifty years ago.

The exhibition will illustrate Warhol’s career-long exploration inside the contemporary media culture, like: the news, serial imagery, celebrity and death.

Andy Warhol began the Jackie series in February 1964. The exhibition begins with the paintings of Jacqueline Kennedy on the day of JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963, from the smiling Jackie arriving at Dallas Love Field and finally, at the funeral, as she transforms from glamorous and iconic First Lady to grieving widow.

Warhol cropped images taken from Life magazine and silkscreened them on to canvas.

The Jackie paintings were produced as elements in a series that can be arranged in various permutations, such as grids, friezes, triptychs, diptychs or singles with mixed, repeated or inverted imagery.

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was not only the leader of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, but maybe the most influential American artist of the past century.