Displaying items by tag: jackie kennedy

While preparing for the exhibition John Singer Sargent’s Watercolors, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston discovered photocopied letters that Jacqueline Kennedy had written to the museum’s former director, Perry Rathbone. The letters, which were found in the museum’s archives, were written two months after John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

The correspondence was spurred by Rathbone’s offer to extend the loan of four of the six Sargents that hung in the Kennedys’ private sitting room in the White House. Jackie responded by saying, ““You cannot imagine what they mean to me – or perhaps you can because you extended their loan so chivalrously. But they were in the room — the only room in the White House which was our private, happy sitting room — where the children tumbled around — where we sat with friends. And the ones I chose were on the wall opposite where I sat. The President sat under them. Whenever I think of all our happy days and evenings in this strange house … I think of him sitting in his favorite chair with the Sargents over his head. Perhaps it is a way to cling to a past that can never be the same again — perhaps in a few months they will make me so sad that I will want to send them back to you … But right now they are a consolation.”  

Jackie Kennedy eventually returned the works to the MFA; they are currently on display as part of the Sargent’s Watercolor exhibition, which is on view through January 20, 2014.

The traveling exhibition, Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal, marks the 25^th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) death. The tribute to the pioneering pop artist features over 300 works including paintings, photographs, screen-prints, sculptures, and films and presents Warhol’s famous Campbell’s soup cans as well as his iconic portraits of Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and Mao Zedong.

15 Minutes Eternal, the largest traveling exhibition of Warhol’s work to date, has already been on display in Singapore and is currently on view at the Hong Kong Museum of Art through March 31, 2013. However, a few changes will have to be made before the works appear in Beijing next year as China’s Ministry of Culture has requested that the 10 Mao paintings be left out of the Beijing leg of the tour. Created in 1972 after Richard Nixon made his historic visit to China, the Mao portraits were made by applying acrylic and silkscreen-ink to canvas and went on to become some of Warhol’s best-known works.

The 26-month Asian tour has already been a success with 175,000 people visiting the exhibition in Singapore. Officials hope that the absence of the Mao paintings will not affect attendance in Beijing. The last stop on the tour is Tokyo, where the exhibition will be on view from February 1, 2014 to May 6, 2014.