Artists & Works

STYLE: POP ART
HOMAGE TO PICASSO

James Rosenquist is part of the early sixties explosion of Pop artists that included Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and others. A virtuoso professional sign painter, Rosenquist became known almost immediately for the sheer size of his works, including the massive F-111, at 10 x 86 feet, Pop's largest painting. Rosenquist studied at the Art Students League in the fifities, and while living in New York became known as one of the best billboard painters in town. In 1960, he left the commercial world, and had his first one-man show in 1962. He became notorious when F-111 debuted at the Metopolitan Museum of Art in 1968, in the company of masterpieces of history painting by David, Poussin, and others. Major museum retrospectives of Rosenquist's work began in the seventies and continue through today, one of the most recent in 2003 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Rosenquist's work has always focused on contemporary culture and technology. Indeed, F-111 is named after a supersonic jet fighter that was never built. At first the artist's imagery may seem easy to understand, perhaps even shallow, but the context-free juxtapositions of imagery and the layering of many potent images over each other have a cumulative effect on the viewer--as some critics have said, there is a "seepage" of meaning from these accessible, colorful works. The Rosenquist print for the Homage to Picasso portfolio is typical in its cryptic mixture of elements.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Bruce Watson, Smithsonian, 1/04
At the start of his 70s, Rosenquist remains, as one Artforum critic noted, the painter of "the clutter that adds up to the emptiness of American space." He is planning a 50-footsquare mural for a San Francisco hotel and wondering where his next painting will take him. "Recently I was saying to Jasper Johns that I was having trouble with a certain painting," he notes. "And Johns said, 'It doesn't get any easier, does it?' That's because Johns is very true to himself, and like me, very anxious not to repeat what's already been done."
As for Pop art, the frenetic hodgepodges that once looked so daring and outrageous now seem as modern and commonplace as a remote-control surf through the dizzying images of cable television. A cereal box label. Click. A young girl's face. Click. A razor blade. Click. A lipsticked mouth. More than most modern artists, Rosenquist recognized that popular culture is not a freeze frame but images zapping by in rapid-fire succession. His own amazing array of them seems driven by his determination to be, above all, an American original. "I always wanted to make something different," he says. "All the paintings I'd seen looked like they were viewed through a window frame. I wanted to do something that spilled out of the painting onto the floor, something that stuck out in your face."