Andy Warhol

Flash-November 22,1963 | FS-II.38

Screenprints, colophon and text on white paper.
1968
21″ x 21″
Edition of 200, 26 numbered in Roman numerals; 10 lettered A-J have 3 additional (see below) screenprints, each of which is a composite of images from #33 and #38. Each print is signed in ball-point pen on verso, the colophon is signed and numbered in a ball-point pen.
Portfolio of 11 screenprints, colophon and text.
Printer: Aetna Silkscreen Products, Inc., New York
Publisher: Racolin Press, Inc., Briarcliff Manor

Andy Warhol – Edition Prints – Flash – November 22, 1963

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Andy Warhol Flash – November 22, 1963 is a range of artworks created by artist Andy Warhol.

This 1968 portfolio was named for “news flash” Teletype texts reporting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The portfolio’s cover includes an image of the November 22, 1963, New York World-Telegram front page with the headline “President Shot Dead.” Screenprinted Teletype texts, relaying the unfolding situation, are used as “wrappers” to surround the screenprinted images related to the assassination. Warhol’s use of this news story more than four years after it first shocked the nation presents an afterimage that suggests the media and public obsession with the tragedy. “I’d been thrilled having Kennedy as president,” mused the artist: “he was handsome, young, smart—but it didn’t bother me much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad. It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get away from the thing.”

When Andy Warhol first burst onto the artistic stage in the 1960s’, he did so by incorporating images that were firmly embedded in the American psyche. His bright and colorful paintings and serigraphs presented images that were commonplace — a soup can or coke bottle — but were transformed by his technique into artistic icons of popular culture. Warhol was most interested in image and not reality, although one could say that by casting these mass produced commercial images in his own unique style, Warhol was making a comment on the reality of living in a world that was dominated by images from the advertising and entertainment industries. Warhol’s prints are in essence images of images. They are at least once removed, and often several times removed, from reality. His famous prints of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, not to mention countless other celebrities, are based on photographs. As in the case with Marilyn Monroe, many of those photographs are of his subjects posing as a character, not as themselves, a subtle reminder that once someone achieves a certain celebrity status, they become further and further removed from their real selves. How many layers must one remove to finally see the real person depicted in a Warhol print?