James Rosenquist
American, 1933-2017

Above, from the suite, "High Technology and Mysticism: A Meeting Point", 1981
color lithograph
28 x 28 in.

SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Contemporary Collectors Group in memory of Rowe Giesen
1982.51.2



Artist James Rosenquist at work in his studio in Florida, June 1986. (Photo by Jack Mitchell/Getty Images)

"Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind." - James Rosenquist

POSTSCRIPT

A pioneer of the Pop art movement, James Rosenquist rearranges and overlaps images and symbols to create fragmented icons that compel the viewer to examine the familiar in a more abstract and provocative way. At the brink of the Digital Revolution, Rosenquist contemplated the human relationship to technology, the environment, and religion in this stunning portfolio of seven lithographs featuring imagery derived from the sciences, nature, and mass media.

Rosenquist’s references to mass-produced goods and to magazines, films and other aspects of the mass media, together with his dispassionate and seemingly anonymous technique, ensured that he was regarded as one of the key figures in the development of Pop art in the United States. In 1948, while still in school, he won a scholarship to study at the Minneapolis School of Art, and from 1952 to 1955 he studied painting at the University of Minnesota. In 1955, he moved to New York to study at the Art Students League on a scholarship. He earned his living as a billboard painter from 1957, and in 1960 he began to apply similar techniques of grossly enlarged and fragmented images to huge paintings.

- Paddle8.Inc

COMMENTS

James Rosenquist became well known in the 1960s as a leading American Pop artist alongside contemporaries Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and other figurative artists. As with his contemporaries, Rosenquist’s background in commercial art deeply influenced his nascent fine-art career and radically changed the face of the art world and the annals of art history. While each Pop artist developed a distinct style, there were commonalities in their approaches to image-making that helped define the Pop art movement in the early 1960s: the use of commercial art techniques, and the depiction of popular imagery and everyday objects.

Drawing on his early experience as a billboard painter, Rosenquist culled imagery from print advertisements, photographs, and popular periodicals and recombined these to create mysterious and bold compositions. Utilizing the visual language of advertising, described by the late American curator Walter Hopps as "visual poetry," his work has plumbed questions ranging from the economic, romantic, and ecological to the scientific, cosmic and existential. Creating seminal new work over more than five decades, Rosenquist consistently expressed facile talent in painting, collage, drawing, and printmaking. His work is included in major public and private institutions, and has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, The Menil Collection, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Denver Art Museum, Tretiakov Gallery, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, and other international institutions.

jamesrosenquiststudio.com/biography

Synopsis
A seminal figure in the Pop Art movement, James Rosenquist is best known for his colossal collage paintings of enigmatically juxtaposed fragmentary images borrowed largely from advertisements and mass media. Brought together and enlarged so as to cover entire gallery walls and overwhelm the viewer, these seemingly unrelated pictures of consumer products, weaponry, and celebrities hint at the artist's social, political, and cultural concerns. The billboard painter-turned-artist's early works are also considered emblematic of a burgeoning consumer culture in America during the 1960s. Six decades into his career, Rosenquist continues to create massive, provocative paintings, whose relevance hinges on their engagement with current economic, political, environmental, and scientific issues.

Key Ideas
The artist was among the first to directly address the persuasive, even deceptive, powers of advertising by applying the Surrealist practice of juxtaposing seemingly unrelated subjects to fragmented commercial images and ads in a manner that highlights the omnipresence of ads.

An advocate for his fellow artists, Rosenquist used his prominent artistic reputation to help lobby for federal protection of artists' rights during the 1970s and was soon thereafter appointed to the National Council on the Arts.

Because he successfully moved beyond his early fascination with popular culture and mass media to address new issues, such as the intersection of science and aesthetics, Rosenquist is credited with being one the few Pop artists whose later work continues to be relevant.

Biography

Childhood
James Rosenquist, born in North Dakota, was the only child of amateur pilots Ruth and Louis Rosenquist. His father's search for work repairing planes meant that the family moved frequently, particularly during World War II, occasionally sending Rosenquist to stay with his grandfather on his farm near Mekinock, North Dakota. When the war concluded, the family settled in Minneapolis. By then, Rosenquist had lived in five different towns and attended seven different schools, all the while working during his summers and after school collecting newspapers, selling ice cream, picking seasonal produce at his grandfather's farm, and making deliveries for a local drug store.

Throughout these years, Rosenquist's mother, also an amateur painter, nurtured her son's budding creativity by taking him to visit art schools and museums whenever she could. Paper was hard to find, but young Rosenquist made do by drawing on rolls of discarded wallpaper. While his parents were away working, the artist sketched large battle scenes, cars, airplanes, and boats, honing his abilities. In eighth grade, Rosenquist's watercolor of a sunset won him a scholarship for four free classes at the Minneapolis School of Art (now Minneapolis College of Art and Design). While there, he was exposed to "real artists" - veterans who had studied art in Paris after World War II.

Early Training
Rosenquist's formal art training began in 1952 when he matriculated to the University of Minnesota and studied under painter Cameron Booth. An American Abstract Expressionist who had studied in France under the guidance of renown German painter Hans Hofmann, Booth introduced his students to modern and contemporary art movements and took them to exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago.

During his first summer at the university, Rosenquist began working as a commercial sign painter, traveling throughout Minnesota and Iowa for various jobs. Although today most signs are printed, in the 1950s billboards were painted by hand, a job that took a good deal of skill and considerable effort. Rosenquist painted large-scale signs based on small pictures he was given so that the image could be seen from far away - even from a moving car. Commercial sign painting, a job that would have a long-term impact on his art, did not however, deter the artist from creating Abstract Expressionist paintings at school. Rosenquist considered action painting particularly heroic, admiring what he described as "splashing your psyche on the canvas."

Legacy
James Rosenquist's irreverent and at times surreal appropriation of popular culture and the materials and techniques of advertising inspired several other artists. For example, Richard Prince's photographic use of advertisement imagery demonstrates Rosenquist's influence, as do Marilyn Minter's ad-inspired paintings. Rosenquist's legacy has impacted many contemporary artists, such as Jeff Koons, whose vibrant works often echo the huge scale and incorporation of popular imagery and advertisements characteristic of Rosenquist's paintings. His significance to modern art is assured, but Rosenquist himself was unconcerned about how or if he will be remembered after death: "You live till you die, and that's the end of it. What good is your legacy when you are dead? I worry about being alive, selling work, having fun, moving and doing things when I am alive."

theartstory.org