James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist (born in 1933) first emerged as a seminal figure of the American Pop art movement of the 1960s. From an early age, his mother, who was also a painter, encouraged him to have an artistic interest. While in junior high school, Rosenquist won a scholarship to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He then enrolled in the University of Minnesota, painting commercial signs on storage bins, grain elevators, gasoline tanks, and water tanks during the summers to support himself. In 1955, Rosenquist won a scholarship to study at the Art Students League in New York City, where he made a living in painting billboards high above Times Square.  Having absorbed the industrial techniques and imagery of advertising, he began applying them to his own art, using the cheap, industrial paints leftover from his jobs to create canvases of overlapping, juxtaposed images. Rising in fame, Rosenquist quit his billboard job by 1960, and in 1962, he had his first solo exhibition, which helped to establish him as a new and important Pop artist.

“I never wanted to look as if I was copying someone else’s style,” Rosenquist said, “I wanted to do something new”. Together with other artists in that era (such as Warhol and Lichtenstein), he began painting in a new style by utilizing popular American images in his work, which provided commentaries on the emergence of 1950s consumer culture. Art has always been an expression of what takes place in society, and in the 60s, the U.S was a chaos of consumption, advertising, television, comics and fashion. The central theme in “Pop Art” was the message that popular imagery had become so prevalent in everyday life that the images themselves were now art. Pop artists were focused on imagery of icons including figures such as Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, or everyday household items such as Campbell's soup cans.

Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato)”, 1962

Tom Wesselmann’s “Still Life #35”, 1963

As well as depicting popular images, Pop Art is defined by simple, crisp lines and bright colours, features that are also used in advertising. Unlike the realistic work of the old masters who painted art as though looking out of a window, pop art simplifies objects, and saturates or even changes their colour entirely, making them abstract. For example, in many of Andy Warhol’s portraits of icons, he uses bright colours to paint a face rather a realistic skin colour, as shown in in his famous silkscreen prints of Marilyn Monroe:

Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn”, 1967

In this print, Warhol uses large zones of non-representational, artificial colour to portray Monroe. The saturated colours used- orange, pink, yellow and red- are the colours you would expect to see in a comic book. Rather than using shading and including detail in his art, Warhol paints with a definitive line, outlining Monroe’s face and features. Much like Rosenquist’s work, and other Pop artists, Warhol manipulates and simplifies his subject to create an art piece very similar in style to commercial art.

Whereas Warhol printed his images, which were usually of just one thing or person, Rosenquist painted images in combinations. He worked by collecting and accumulating clippings that he obtained from mass-produced magazines, notably Life magazine, and arranging the images into source collages for his paintings. “If you take a walk through midtown Manhattan,” Rosenquist once explained,  “you might in quick succession see a street vendor, the back of a girl's legs, [and] a taxi as it comes close to hitting you. You see parts of things and you rationalize them into a scenario.” Collage provided the artist with an effective way of representing the fragmentary nature of city life, as he saw it.

Rosenquist used collage as a way to support and emphasise ideas or messages. Individually, the various images he uses convey their own meaning, but when combined the images take on potential new meanings that remain open to interpretation. A powerful example of this effect can be seen in Silver Skies (1962).

James Rosenquist’s “Silver Skies”, 1962

Within this work, Rosenquist combines fragmented images showing tires, a car, the face of a young girl and a bottle. The young girl is painted red, with a flower in her hair. Red, as not only the colour of love but also of sin, could be seen within the context of this painting as a comment on society’s view of young girls. This, together with the legs poking through the rose, may be a suggestion from Rosenquist that young girls are growing up too quickly. The theme of automobiles in the collage suggests men’s overexcitement and obsession with their cars. The grey colour tones throughout suggest dirtiness or pollution. On the left-hand-side of the painting is a shrieking goose, who possibly stands to represent nature, crying about mans’ pollution of earth. Individually, none of these images would lead me to these conclusions; however, through contrasting images of modern life in his work, Rosenquist manages to simply yet effectively convey a set of strong messages to the viewer.

Rosenquist also uses collage to overwhelm his viewer, for example in Animal Screams (1986).

James Rosenquist’s “Animal Screams”, 1986

Rosenquist has painted 147 different words for peace around this canvas. The wide array of languages demonstrates the widespread desire for peace among people, but it also shows the difficulty in understanding or interpreting others’ desires. As I see it the message of the painting is that we’re all desperately shouting for peace, but are misunderstood, as suggested by the title itself, “Animal Screams”. Rosenquist portrays vocal animals in this painting, in the form of parrots and a dog. The screams of these animals are hectic and noisy. Emphasising this chaos, Rosenquist takes the image of a face and shreds it into strips, painting a new image within the space created between them: a technique he also uses in Star Thief (date). This way, the form of the face is suggested, whilst still showing the remainder of the painting beneath it. Using this technique, Rosenquist abstracts the subject and creates dynamism and energy. I think that the mayhem Rosenquist portrays in this piece by using collage of images and languages, in bright, jarring colours, shows the confusion and disorganization of the mankind’s call for peace. Perhaps Rosenquist is trying to suggest that in order to achieve peace, we need to collaborate with, rather than speak over, each other.

As well as collage and juxtaposition, colour and form are central to Rosenquist’s art. The images he would paint whilst working as a billboard painter were so large, and close up, that often all he could see was their colour and texture, and as one billboard quickly replaced another, Rosenquist had no reason to be interested in the actual objects he painted. Instead, he was solely focused on the scale of the objects, and their colour – both central to advertising and its effect of bombarding the viewer. Rosenquist wanted his viewer to look at the colour and form of his paintings, rather than only formulating ideas about his work based on pre-determined ideas about the content. His use of anonymous advertising clippings in early works often show subjects with little obvious affect or association, displaying images of no contemporary attachment, but rather impartiality and numbness, as in his painting I love you with my Ford (1961). In the top third section of the canvas, Rosenquist has painted the grill of a 1950s Ford, a car that was no longer fashionable but not yet sentimentalized either:

James Rosenquist’s “I Love You with my Ford”, 1961

Rosenquist further abstracted the subject of his paintings using scale. Because of the large, overwhelming size of his work, the individual forms painted become abstracted when viewed close-up, as the painting dissolves into areas of pure colour, texture and shape.

Rosenquist’s exploration in to “something new” has left a lasting impression on the art world and artists now. Some of the biggest names in today’s art- Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst’s spots and Romero Britto- all work in a Pop style pioneered by artists such as Rosenquist.

Damien Hirst's "2-Amino-5-Bromobenzotrifluoride”, 2011

From Damien Hirst’s “2-Amino-5-Bromobenzotrifluoride”, it is clear that Hirst has very similar ideas in terms of colour and scale as those of Rosenquist. Like Rosenquist, Hirst uses the scale of the canvas in this piece to overwhelm the viewer. However, Hirst has gone further than Rosenquist in terms of abstraction, as he has no real subject. Whereas Rosenquist used scale to assist in emphasising colour, Hirst has no subject at all in this piece, and therefore the focus is placed entirely on the colour of the polka dots painted. Instead of showing that consumerism can be art, as Rosenquist had, Hirst goes on to prove that simple polka dots can be art. 

Jeff Koons’ “Balloon Dog”, 1994-2001

Jeff Koons’ “Balloon Dog” also shows influence from Rosenquist’s ideas. Koons takes a balloon animal- a simple, everyday object-and enlarges it in order to abstract and bring new meaning to it as art. The enormous scale of the piece creates a focus on colour, and in the style of Rosenquist and other Pop artists, Koons chooses a saturated, bold colour: pink.

I really like Rosenquist’s work. I first came across one of his paintings, F-111 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City during my summer holiday.

James Rosenquist’s “F-111”, 1964-65

What was immediately striking about F-111, and what ultimately led me to look into researching Rosenquist for my AP3 project, were the bright colours that popped out at you upon entering the exhibition space. Originally made to be installed at the Leo Castelli gallery, the painting wraps around all four walls of a small room in the MoMA, immersing the viewer in the work, and evoking the way advertisements bombard and consume viewers. While the impact of the colours, together with the sheer size of the painting, was captivating, what held my attention was the content of the painting.

F-111 is an anti-war painting. It was painted in 1964, during the Cold War. It shows an F-111 military plane, in development at the time, flying through fragmented images of American consumerism and advertisement. We see the images of angel food cake, spaghetti, light-bulbs, a beach umbrella, a tire and a little girl sitting under a hairdryer, juxtaposed by the threatening images of an atomic mushroom cloud and the fighter plane. By painting the F-111 like an advertisement, and placing it amidst consumer items, Rosenquist questions the relationship between the war machine and advertisement. He calls to question consumer influence on the weapon, as well as the weapon’s influence on consumers.

In the image of the young girl under the hairdryer, the hairdryer resembles a jet pilot’s helmet. She stands to represent the middle-class society that was the driving force - or pilot - of the creation of the plane. The nuclear cloud to the right of it juxtaposes this image. While the warplane’s production provided wealth to the workers in America, Rosenquist realised that it would also be responsible for the death of people elsewhere. He wanted to remove the distance between those two situations and make Americans more aware of the implications of war. Emphasising this, a beach umbrella is painted over the explosion. For me, a beach umbrella represents relaxation and a spectacle. I think Rosenquist was trying to communicate through the imagery used that Americans were simply laying back and relaxing while the fear of death was immanent for others.

Rosenquist painted parts of spaghetti directly on top of aluminium panels. In this way, the theme of machinery seems to run into the spaghetti. He has painted patches of the spaghetti with neon paint, making it appear radioactive. The broken light bulbs in the painting look as though they are falling out of the plane, like bombs. By incorporating ideas of weaponry and radiation into an everyday object of consumption, Rosenquist again manages to makes war feel closer to home than usually portrayed. .

Outside of the small room in the MoMA showing “F-111” were some of Rosenquist’s preparatory collages. Whilst the style of the finished paintings works to conceal evidence of the artist’s hand, the collages reveal a deliberate, planned grouping of images collected over many years. Through them we are given an insight into how Rosenquist formulated his ideas, and can see his chaotic enthusiasm, rather than just looking at the polished product.

Rosenquist said that he never cared for the term “Pop Art”, explaining that “pops” sounded to him as though it “goes off with a bang and then fizzles”. However, to this day, he remains a relevant and in-demand painter, and his innovative ideas have been clearly influential.