Commissioned by Racolin Press in 1968, Flash—November 22, 1963, is thematically related to portraits of Jackie Kennedy that Warhol made in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination. In contrast to these earlier works in which Jackie’s grief-stricken face becomes an archetypal image for the tragedy as a whole, Flash is a fragmented narrative comprised of disjointed snapshots spanning events from the Kennedy campaign to Lee Harvey Oswald’s capture. Here Warhol masterfully manipulates images appropriated from campaign posters, television, newspapers, and advertisements, by reversing and/or superimposing them, varying their scale and clarity, and adding saturated, often dissonant color. In contrast to the dizzying and emotional power of the pictures which are presented out of sequence, the accompanying text, which is written and printed to simulate a Teletype wire service report of news “flashes” on the President’s assassination, reads chronologically. Through this tension between document and artistic license, Warhol comments on the power of the media to shape what we see and how we see it. As he described, “I’d been thrilled having Kennedy as a president, 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 everyone to feel so sad. It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get away from the thing.”