Warhol’s Flash – November 22, 1963

Warhol’s Flash portfolio contains eleven screenprints based on campaign posters, newspaper clippings, photographs from magazines, and advertisements collected by the artist and his assistant Gerard Malanga in 1963. The artworks were each accompanied by a folio of teletype text written by Phillip Greer, evoking the wire-service reports of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  The portfolio presents a fragmented narrative comprised of disjointed snapshots spanning events from JFK’s presidential campaign to Lee Harvey Oswald’s capture. Rather than providing a straightforward chronological account, Warhol’s visual structure emulates the fractured and confusing way in which news is communicated in the modern age. 

Warhol reflected on the impact and pervasiveness of the event:

‘When President Kennedy was shot that fall, I heard the news over the radio while I was alone painting in my studio. I don't think I missed a stroke. I wanted to know what was going on out there, but that was the extent of my reaction. I'd been thrilled about having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart – but it didn't bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way 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.’

The Flash portfolio continues the themes established in Warhol’s earlier Death and Disaster series, in which he appropriated images from newspapers, magazines, and television to expose the power of mass media over the collective consciousness. In 1963, he screenprinted portraits of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as images of car crashes and other tragedies. By presenting these disparate subjects in repetitive sequences, he invited viewers to reconsider their relationship with the relentless news cycle and challenged conventional distinctions between commercial and fine art.

The Flash portfolio is also closely related to Warhol’s iconic portraits of Jackie Kennedy, created in the immediate aftermath of the president’s death. In those works, the haunting image of Jackie’s face was cropped, enlarged, and repeated until it transcended portraiture, becoming a symbol of mourning and tragedy on a universal scale. A similar process of transformation occurs in the Flash portfolio, capturing the media frenzy surrounding the Kennedy presidency. Seven of the eleven prints derive from a photographic portrait of JFK himself. Through repetition and recontextualisation, these images become both recognisable and strangely unfamiliar, immortalising the individual historical figure.

1967 saw the emergence of Factory Additions, a company created by Warhol with the purpose of producing and distributing prints based on his most famous motifs. He began making entire portfolios, in editions of 250 or 300, and occasionally as little as 200, altering colours from print to print. More imposing than singular prints, the portfolios illustrated both the playful and profound effect of image variation and repetition. Later in his career, closer to his untimely death in 1987, he produced portfolios on themes, such as Ads, Myths and Endangered Species, but in the beginning each portfolio comprised a series of prints of the same image in different colour combinations. 

Flash – November 22, 1963 stands apart from this model as its eleven prints are not simply variations on a single image: each is different, forming a compelling narrative when viewed together. The portfolio was originally presented in a box, resembling a newspaper archive or journalistic record of a historical event. This distinguishes Flash from many of Warhol’s other portfolios and reinforces its concern with documentation, reporting, and the ways in which history can be constructed.

There is a grim irony in the fact that, while working on Flash in 1968, Warhol was the victim of an assassination attempt. On June 3rd, 1968, Valerie Solanas, one of his female film stars, barged into The Factory on Union Square and fired a barrage of bullets at the artist. One hit Warhol and twisted its way through his abdomen and chest before penetrating the right lung. Undergoing extensive surgery and left with three large scars running across his chest and stomach, the artist narrowly escaped death.

The attack had a profound and lasting effect on Warhol, leaving him paranoid and suspicious of fans who had previously walked freely in and out of his studio. The experience intensified his preoccupation with death and tragedy which was to influence his work for the remainder of his career. The strange coincidence of the two events should not necessarily be understood as a direct subject of the portfolio, but this context inevitably lends the Flash portfolio an unsettling dimension: the artist contemplates a national tragedy while confronting his own mortality.

Throughout his career, Warhol used vibrant, highly saturated colours to refigure and reimagine images drawn from the black-and-white pages of newspapers and magazines. His silkscreen technique, first employed for a portrait of Marilyn Monroe following her death in 1962, allowed him to reproduce familiar imagery while transforming and elegising the movie star. For his Flash portfolio, Warhol experimented with the limits of this process, using only two or three screens for each print and reducing the range of tones. The resulting images appear stark and hauntingly incomplete, like the hazy afterimage of a memory. Two prints in the portfolio are predominantly black, with Kennedy barely visible. Rather than presenting a clear likeness, Warhol leaves a ghostly outline, appearing like a photographic negative. The effects suggest absence, heightened by the sombre colourway and its association with mourning. In other screenprints, Kennedy is rendered in bright red, a visceral and evocative colour which reflects the tragic drama of the event. Other prints within the portfolio are injected with vivid, candy-coloured hues, heightening a surreal sense of detachment. Warhol’s mastery of colour facilitates a stark juxtaposition with the unsettling and catastrophic events he depicts, reframed through the lens of Pop art.

Ultimately, Flash – November 22, 1963 is both a record and a critique of mid-twentieth-century mass media. Through appropriation, repetition, fragmentation, and the power of colour, Warhol examines the extraordinary extent to which Kennedy’s image has been documented and preserved within the public imagination.