TED KENNEDY by Andy Warhol, Screenprint with diamond dust on board, 1980. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Copyright Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / ARS, New YorkWhen the National Portrait Gallery opened at 11:30 this morning, visitors were able to view the recently installed Andy Warhol portrait of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy in the first-floor gallery space marked “In Memoriam.” The space was designated in June as a place to display images of the recently deceased, beginning with an honorary portrait of Michael Jackson.
The NPG obtained the silk-screened Kennedy portrait in 2000, but it was created by Warhol in 1980 to raise money for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Kennedy later lost the Democratic nomination to Jimmy Carter, who Warhol had portrayed four years earlier.
Describing the artwork, the Portrait Gallery states that it “plays off the colors of the American flag and suggests the glamour of politics by enhancing the candidate’s features with thin red and blue lines and diamond dust.” The gallery’s collection also holds a 1969 pencil and tempera image of the senator created by Boris Chaliapin.
