Over the past four decades, James Rosenquist’s work has reflected the world in which we live. Through his unique brand of imagery Rosenquist has addressed modern issues and current events, registered antiwar statements, and voiced concern over the social, political, economic, and environmental fate of the planet. For much of his career, Rosenquist has also expressed in his work a fascination and curiosity about the cosmos, technology, and scientific theory.

Born in 1933 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, Rosenquist spent his childhood pursuing three main interests: airplanes, cars, and drawing. He liked to draw on rolls of cheap wallpaper, producing long, continuous illustrated stories. He also built model airplanes, inventing his own designs. Rosenquist’s family eventually settled in Minneapolis. As a teenager he took art classes at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and later studied painting at the University of Minnesota. During the summers, he worked as a billboard painter [1]—learning a good deal about figurative and commercial painting techniques from fellow workers. His early training as a billboard painter has continued to influence the scale, content, and style of his works. Many are monumental in scale, contain elements of imagery derived from advertising, and employ commercial painting techniques. In 1955 Rosenquist moved to New York, having received a one-year scholarship to study at the Art Students League. To support himself, he returned to life as a commercial artist, painting billboards in Times Square and across the city.

By 1960, Rosenquist had stopped painting commercial advertisements and rented a small studio space in lower Manhattan. Working against the prevailing tide of Abstract Expressionism, Rosenquist soon developed his own brand of “new realism”—a style that would come to be known as Pop Art. Along with contemporaries Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol, Rosenquist drew on the iconography of advertising and mass media to conjure a sense of contemporary life. In 1962, he had his first solo exhibition at Green Gallery in New York and afterward was included in virtually all the groundbreaking group exhibitions that established Pop Art as a movement.

Rosenquist’s approach to painting came out of a collage mentality that pieced together fragments of imagery gathered from advertising images. As Rosenquist scholar Julia Blaut notes, “Collage for Rosenquist, as it had been since the Cubists first experimented with the medium around 1912, was a metaphor for modern and specifically urban life.” Rosenquist chose to use fractured imagery and discontinuous narrative to express his view of the modern metropolis.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the focus on collage was not limited to the visual arts, but rather linked to many areas of contemporary city life. In urban planning, Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) advocated “urban montage,” an inclusive approach that focused on street life. The essence of collage, in the form of found sounds and the splicing together of otherwise independent theatrical elements, was evident in the music of John Cage and the choreography of Merce Cunningham. In literature, discontinuous narrative and collage were characteristic of the writing of the Beats including writers Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Burroughs experimented with montage, including cut film and photographs, magazine illustrations, and newspaper clippings. Burroughs’s cut-ups involved cutting up his own writing as well as the work of other authors and randomly splicing them together to create a new text. This approach recalls Surrealist philosophy, which sought unexpected poetic combinations of objects and to infuse an element of chance into the art making process. Rosenquist has often referred to the work of the French New Wave filmmakers, including Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Eric Rohmer, whose editing style used jump cuts and inserted unrelated images in place of seamless transitions. Like Rosenquist’s work, the storyline of New Wave films are often left unresolved.

Rosenquist’s work demonstrates an enduring interest in and mastery of texture, color, line, and shape that continues to dazzle audiences and influence new generations of artists. His paintings allude to the cultural and political tenor of the times in which they were created. They convey impressions and opinions about advertising, politics, beauty, space, and time. Fraught with feeling, they have been called “visual poems” that resolutely resist words.

Now, more than 40 years since his career began, Rosenquist continues to work on major commissions from his current home and studio overlooking the Bay of Mexico in Aripeka, Florida, where he has lived since 1976. Large-scale works, often with personal and political themes, still are important to him. Using historical events, personal memories, and science-based allusions, he creates enigmatic narratives and symbols that comment on the failures and foibles of humankind. He achieves these narratives by fragmenting and combining imagery in unexpected ways. His most recent works have incorporated high-tech and cosmic allusions, with themes of time, ecological concerns, anti-violence, and death.

– Adapted from an essay by Sarah Bancroft, exhibition curator

Footnotes:

1. In recent years the development of new printing technologies has changed the way billboard images are produced. Most of today’s billboards are no longer painted, but printed off-site and adhered to the billboard ready-made.