James Rosenquist — huge force in Pop Art
James Rosenquist, who helped define Pop Art in its 1960s heyday with his boldly scaled painted montages of commercial imagery, died Friday in New York City. He was 83.
His wife, Mimi Thompson, said Mr. Rosenquist died at his home after a long illness.
Like his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Mr. Rosenquist developed a powerful graphic style in the early 1960s that traditionalists reviled and a broad public enthusiastically embraced.
The Pop artists took for their subject matter images and objects from the mass media and popular culture, including advertising, comic books and consumer products. They also employed techniques that until then had been associated primarily with commercial and industrial methods of production, like silk screening or, in Mr. Rosenquist’s case, billboard painting.
Mr. Rosenquist drew on his experience painting immense movie billboards above Times Square and a Hebrew National sign in Brooklyn.
It was while working in New York as a sign painter by day and an abstract painter by night that he had the idea to import the giant-scale, broadly painted representational pictures from outdoor advertising into the realm of fine art.
“Was importing the method into art a bit of a cheap trick?” the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in the New Yorker in 2003 on the occasion of a ballyhooed retrospective of Mr. Rosenquist’s work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. “So were Warhol’s photo silk-screening and Lichtenstein’s limning of panels from comic strips.
Mr. Rosenquist’s paintings rarely contained overt political messages, but his bestknown work, the enormous “F-111,” was made in 1964 and 1965 in part as a protest against U.S. militarism. In it, the image of a modern fighter plane stretching 86 feet across a grid of 51 canvas and aluminum panels is interrupted by images of a colossal tire, a beach umbrella, a mushroom cloud, spaghetti and tomato sauce, and a little girl under a chrome hair dryer that resembles a warhead.
He meant to sell the painting as separate panels, but the collector Robert Scull bought it whole and kept it that way. It is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
James Albert Rosenquist was born in Grand Forks, N.D., on Nov. 29, 1933, and grew up in various towns in Minnesota and Ohio before his parents settled in Minneapolis in 1944. His father, Louis, was an airplane mechanic, among other things. His mother, Ruth, an amateur painter who could also fly a plane, encouraged his interests in art, and he won a scholarship to study at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts when he was in junior high school.
In 1955, Mr. Rosenquist received a one-year scholarship to the Art Students League in New York, arriving with $350 in his pocket, he said. He studied there with Will Barnet, Edwin Dickinson and George Grosz, among others.
He also began frequenting the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, a gathering place for painters and poets. “There was Bill de Kooning, Franz Kline,” Mr. Rosenquist told the New York Times in 2003.
After leaving school the next year, he held a series of odd jobs before returning to sign painting, joining the sign painters union and working mostly for the Artkraft Strauss Sign Corp., which painted some of the largest billboards in the world.
“Much of the aesthetic of my work comes from doing commercial art,” Mr. Rosenquist said. “I painted pieces of bread, Arrow shirts, movie stars. It was very interesting. Before I came to New York, I wanted to paint the Sistine Chapel. I thought this is where the school of mural painting exists. You were painting things up close, like big chocolate cakes. In Brooklyn, I painted Schenley whiskey bottles two stories high, 147 of them over every candy store.”
He continued the work until 1960, when he quit for good after two coworkers fell from a scaffold and died.
During the course of his career, Mr. Rosenquist experimented with sculptural assemblage and environmental installations, and he sometimes attached threedimensional objects to his pictures. But he remained mainly a representational painter. In later years, some of his paintings approached a kind of futuristic, kaleidoscopic abstraction, but the play with different sorts of images and illusions persisted.
His first marriage, to Mary Lou Adams, ended in divorce. He is survived by Thompson, his second wife; his son John, from his first marriage; his daughter Lily, from his second marriage; and a grandson, Oscar.
Mr. Rosenquist’s first solo exhibition, at the Green Gallery in 1962, sold out. That same year, his work was included in a survey of new art at Sidney Janis Gallery called “International Exhibition of the New Realists” that put what would soon come to be known as Pop Art on the map of contemporary consciousness.
In 1965, he showed “F-111” in his first exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, which by then represented most of major Pop artists.
In later years, he spent much of his time in Aripeka, Fla., where he kept a home, an office and studio space. A catastrophic fire destroyed the properties in 2009.
William Acquavella, the New York art dealer, said Mr. Rosenquist lost a significant amount of work in the fire.
“He just rebounded from it,” he said. “Another guy would have had a tougher time bouncing back. But he enjoyed working, he enjoyed creating things, and he enjoyed painting.”