James Rosenquist
Pioneering Pop artist who used his training as a billboard painter to subvert consumer capitalism
JAMES ROSENQUIST, who has died aged 83, arrived in New York as a billboard painter in the mid Fifties before pioneering Pop Art alongside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, using the techniques of commercial art to cast a jaundiced eye on the hollow promises of capitalism.
A free spirit from the open plains of America’s Midwest, Rosenquist moved to New York in 1955 at the height of the postwar consumerist frenzy. By 1957 he was busily employed painting billboard advertisements in public places. But in the summer of 1960, after two of his fellow painters fell from their scaffolding in Times Square and died, he handed in his notice and turned full time to what he had been doing in his spare time: making small abstract drawings on paper. Except now he started scaling them up.
Although his work on commercial billboards had been, ostensibly, an exercise in figurative imagery, from his perspective they had always been studies in abstraction. The bubble of a fizzy drink or the reflected sheen on lipstick, painted several metres high, were entirely abstract when seen at close range. “They get so big you can’t see them,” he once observed. And it was this quality that Rosenquist exploited in paintings in which he fragmented commonplace imagery, often sourced from advertisements or news reports, and juxtaposed their shards, to make mysterious, unsettling works of art.
Rosenquist had his first solo exhibition in 1962 at the Green Gallery on 57th Street and his early work packed a powerful subversive punch.
In President Elect (1960-61), for example, he placed a promotional photograph of John F Kennedy used during the presidential campaign of 1960 alongside a fragment of a Chevrolet and a woman’s hands breaking apart a slice of cake – an image taken from an advertisement for chocolate cake, but rendered in unappetising grey, suggesting, according to the artist, the emptiness of the promises of politicians.
Nowhere was his disenchanted take on the modern world more evident than in his cacophonous billboardsized Pop masterpiece F-111 (1964-65), made during the Vietnam War, which caused a sensation when first exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1965. Now in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, it features an image of the US fighter plane muddled up with montaged images of car tyres, patterns, a smiling blonde girl under a missile-shaped hairdryer, coils of revolting-looking spaghetti in sauce and a mushroom cloud superimposed upon a multicoloured umbrella.
In America Rosenquist was regarded as one of the leading Pop Art pioneers, but for many years he was virtually unheard of in Britain; indeed, until relatively recently there was only one Rosenquist painting in a UK public collection. Janet Street-Porter put the omission down to the fact that Rosenquist had not visited the country for more than 30 years since 1974 when he was arrested for swimming in the Serpentine. That all changed in 2006 when the Haunch of Venison gallery mounted a huge retrospective, showing the richness, breadth and remarkable vitality of his work, at three venues across London, featuring more than 50 large-scale paintings and collages from the Sixties onwards. “People over here probably don’t know I could paint”, Rosenquist told the Evening Standard. “Hopefully, they’ll like it now.”
An only child of parents of Swedish descent, James Rosenquist was born on November 29 1933, in Grand Forks, North Dakota. His mother was a keen amateur painter and both parents were pilots who moved from town to town looking for work, finally settling in Minneapolis. James won a scholarship to the Minneapolis School of Art then studied painting at the University of Minnesota before moving to New York in 1955 to study at the Art Students League.
Rosenquist resisted comparisons to contemporaries such as Warhol and Lichtenstein, and indeed his work is much more complex and challenging than either. Much of it began with small collages pasted up from photographs or pictures from magazines cut into dissonant shapes. These were then turned into cohesive paintings which could appear to the viewer as a crazy sea of colours and shapes, but which revealed glimpses of familiar images to hint at fleeting meanings in the chaos. While Warhol “did Coca-Cola bottles and Brillo pads”, Rosenquist told Smithsonian magazine in 2007, he was more concerned with “things that were a little bit familiar but not things you feel nostalgic about. Hot dogs and typewriters – generic things people sort of recognise.”
Rosenquist’s visual language never ceased to reinvent itself and he continued to produce both monumental abstract canvases and complex figurative works such as The Xenophobic Movie Director or Our Foreign Policy (2004), an attack on the war in Iraq, and Hot Sauce (2005), in which a plate of spaghetti is set against the background of an exploding atom bomb, suggesting that the threat of nuclear Armageddon has become normalised.
Like many artists who have made their reputations with attacks on capitalism, Rosenquist could be accused of trying to have his cake and eat it. Of The Swimmer in the Economist (1997-98) – a mammoth piece incorporating swirls of advertising images merging with details borrowed from Picasso’s Guernica – which now greets visitors to Deutsche Bank’s offices in London, one critic was moved to wonder, given the size of the cheque Rosenquist presumably pocketed, whether the painting should be seen, not so much as the artist’s comment on consumer capitalism, but “the bank’s satirical comment on the biddability of artists”.
In April 2009 a fire swept through Hernando County, Florida, where Rosenquist had lived for 30 years, burning his house, studios and warehouse and destroying all the paintings stored there. The same year he published his autobiography, Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art (with David Dalton) in which he recalled: “I painted billboards above every candy store in Brooklyn. I got so I could paint a Schenley whiskey bottle in my sleep”.
Rosenquist married, first, in 1960, Mary Lou Adams. The marriage was dissolved and in 1976 he married, secondly, Mimi Thompson, who survives him with their daughter and a son from his first marriage.