Artist: Andy Warhol (1928-87), born to east European immigrant parents in Pittsburgh, who appointed himself the visual historian of an America he always saw through a stranger's amazed eyes. Typically, he claimed to have been unaffected by one of the most traumatic events in postwar American history. "I heard the news over the radio while I was painting in my studio," he remembered of the day John F Kennedy died. "I don't think I missed a stroke." Friends phoned, stunned. Warhol persuaded a bunch of people to have dinner at a bar on 86th Street but couldn't cheer them up. "It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't get away from the thing."

Subject: Jackie Kennedy (1929-94), born Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, later Jackie Onassis. She worked as a photographer before marrying ambitious Democratic politician JFK in 1953. She became the nation's most celebrated First Lady when Kennedy was elected US president in 1961. On November 22,1963 she was with Kennedy in an open car crossing Dealey Plaza in Dallas when the shots were fired that changed America's sense of itself, breeding paranoia and countless conspiracy theories.