By KEN JOHNSON APRIL 1, 2017
James Rosenquist, who helped
define Pop Art in its 1960s heyday with his boldly scaled painted montages of
commercial imagery, died on Friday in New York City. He was 83 years old.
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 himself 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.
“The goal in all cases,” Mr.
Schjeldahl added, “was to fuse painting aesthetics with the semiotics of
media-drenched contemporary reality. The naked efficiency of anti-personal
artmaking defines classic Pop. It’s as if someone were inviting you to inspect
the fist with which he simultaneously punches you.”
Mr. Rosenquist drew inspiration,
too, from the tradition of Surrealistic collage, as well as from the montage
designs of contemporary advertising, to create disjunctive compositions of
cropped and fragmented images of cars, movie stars, food products and domestic
appliances.
Though painted by hand in a
lucidly simplified realistic style, the juxtapositions of images remain
mysterious. The paintings could be viewed both as critiques of modern
consumerism and as glimpses into the collective American consciousness.
“The art’s formal ingenuity can
jump out at you as forcefully as the grill of a Ford or a fragment of Marilyn
Monroe’s lips or the cap from a Pepsi bottle or a stack of Fiesta dishes in a
dish rack,” Michael Kimmelman wrote in The New York Times, also in 2003.
Mr. Rosenquist’s paintings rarely
contained overt political messages, but his best-known work, the enormous
"F-111," was made in 1964 and 1965 in part as a protest against
American 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.
Mr. Rosenquist 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.
Mr. Rosenquist studied art at the
University of Minnesota from 1952 to 1954, and during his summer vacation in
1953 he worked for a contractor painting gas station signs, storage tanks and
grain silos.
After receiving an associate
degree in studio art, he went to work for a billboard company painting
advertisements for movies, liquor and soft drinks. One assignment, during the
Davy Crockett craze that swept the United States on the heels of a Walt Disney
mini-series, was to paint eight-foot-wide coonskin caps.
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 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
Corporation, 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 co-workers fell from a scaffold and died.
That year he rented the former
studio of Agnes Martin at 3-5 Coenties Slip, a building on the East River in
Lower Manhattan where Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns and Jack
Youngerman also had studios.
Until then, Mr. Rosenquist had
been making paintings consisting of allover fields of brushmarks in the spirit
of Abstract Expressionism. Now, influenced in part by the works of Robert
Rauschenberg and Mr. Johns, whom he had gotten to know, he began to use his
sign painting skills.
During the course of his career,
Mr. Rosenquist experimented with sculptural assemblage and environmental
installations, and he sometimes attached three-dimensional 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.
Mr. Rosenquist’s first marriage,
to Mary Lou Adams, ended in divorce. He is survived by Ms. 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.
The painting was subsequently
exhibited at the Jewish Museum and then taken on a tour or Europe. Besides the
show at the Guggenheim in 2003, Mr. Rosenquist had museum retrospectives at the
National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 1968; the Whitney Museum of American
Art in New York in 1972; and the Denver Art Museum in 1985. He had an
exhibition at the Haunch of Venison Gallery in London, now defunct, in 2006,
and a solo show at the Acquavella Galleries in New York in 2012. His most
recent exhibition opened last fall at the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris. And
the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, will host an exhibition of his work
later this year.
For many years he worked out of a
loft building on Chambers Street that he bought in 1977 for $120,000. In 1978,
he was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to a six-year term on the National
Council on the Arts, a group that advises the National Endowment for the Arts.
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 that 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.”
Mr. Rosenquist also had homes in
Bedford, N.Y., and Miami. Recently, he had been spending most of his time in
New York City, Ms. Thompson said.
In 2009, Mr. Rosenquist published
an autobiography, “Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art,” written with
David Dalton. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Dwight Garner called it “a
ruddy and humble book, lighted from within by the author’s plainspoken,
blue-collar charm.”
In the book, Mr. Rosenquist
talked about the movement he helped launch.
“Pop Art. I’ve never cared for
the term, but after half a century of being described as a Pop artist I’m
resigned to it,” he said. “Still, I don’t know what Pop Art means, to tell you
the truth.”
Eli Rosenberg contributed
reporting.
