James Rosenquist

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Rosenquist, James (1933– ). American painter, born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, one of his country's leading Pop artists. After studying at the Minneapolis School of Art and the University of Minnesota, he won a scholarship to the Art Students League, New York (1955–6), where he met Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. During the 1950s he supported himself for several years as a commercial artist and billboard painter, and he later recalled his excitement on entering an advertising factory for the first time in 1954 and seeing ‘sixty-foot long paintings of beer glasses and macaroni salads sixty-feet wide. I decided I wanted to work there.’ He was the only major Pop artist who knew this part of the advertising world as an insider. In 1962 he had his first one-man exhibition (at the Green Gallery, New York), in which he adapted the imagery of his advertising work. Mathew Baigell writes that ‘A typical painting by Rosenquist consists of enlarged, overscaled, and juxtaposed fragments of unrelated objects; the effect is that of random layers of paintings on a billboard or images interrupted by turning the dial of a television set’ (Dictionary of American Art, 1979). Rosenquist has sometimes incorporated objects such as mirrors and neon lights in his paintings, and in the 1970s he began experimenting with printmaking, but he has continued to produce his characteristic billboard-style works.

James Rosenquist 1933–, American painter, b. Grand Forks, N.Dak. He moved to New York City in 1955. Identified with the pop art movement, Rosenquist incorporates disparate and fragmented images of everyday American life into his huge canvases. Although they are realistically painted, they can appear abstract because of their vast scale and color. Rosenquist borrowed from his earlier experience as a billboard painter for the style, technique, imagery, and aesthetic of these works. His best-known painting, the epic F-111 (1965), is a 51-panel work occupying the walls of an entire room; it enigmatically juxtaposes such images as a fighter bomber, a child under a hair dryer, a cake, a mushroom cloud and beach umbrella, light bulbs, a tire, and a mass of spaghetti, suggesting a connection between consumerist affluence and war. Rosenquist, who has sometimes worked in sculpture, mixed media, and collage, is also a prolific printmaker.

Bibliography: See his autobiography, Painting below Zero (2009, with D. Dalton); J. Goldman, James Rosenquist (1985); C. W. Glenn, Time Dust: James Rosenquist Complete Graphics 1962–1992 (1993); J. Hopps et al., James Rosenquist: A Retrospective (2003).