Jacqueline Kennedy I (Jackie I)

By rendering this image of Jacqueline Kennedy in silver, Warhol inducts her into the pantheon of his most celebrated subjects, including Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley, whom he also immortalized in the shimmering metallic paint. Not only was silver symbolic of the ‘silver screen’ of Hollywood and the burgeoning TV industry, in the 1960s silver was also the color of the moment. “Silver was the future, it was spacy” Warhol remembered, “the astronauts wore silver suits, Shepherd, Grissom and Glenn had already been up in them, and their equipment was silver too. And silver was also the past – the Silver Screen – Hollywood actresses photographed in silver sets” (A. Warhol, Popism, New York, 1980, pp. 64-65). For Warhol, silver was also the Pop color, being the color of consumerism, of silver foil and tin cans, of chrome plating, rockets, jet planes and fast cars. It was in 1963 that Warhol sported silver hair and when his studio first became the ‘Silver Factory’ papered throughout in silver. “Well you might say” Warhol once told an interviewer on the subject, in a masterpiece of understatement, “I have a fondness for silver” (A. Warhol, quoted by K. Goldsmith (ed). I’ll be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, New York, 2004, p. 98).