Andy Warhol Flash (Additional Screenprints)

Flash – November 22, 1963 is an additional series of three screenprints to the artist’s Flash portfolio, wherein the artist explores the assassination of President John F Kennedy’s assassination through the lens of the news cycle. 

Appropriating images collected after Kennedy’s death in newspapers, Warhol manipulates, edits and crops found imagery with his now fluent screenprinting process. In each example of the suite, the president’s face is superimposed over an image of the Presidential Seal. In the second print (II.43B), the images appear to fade into one, mirroring the fast real pace and ubiquity of the news coverage of the fatal incident. The assassination for Warhol is of collective, not individual concern: 

‘ 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."