James Rosenquist, Who Channeled America’s Heady, Hollow Postwar Exuberance, Dies at 83

BY Andrew Russeth, POSTED 04/01/17 1:59
James Rosenquist, F-111, 1964, COURTESY MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
In 1961, James Rosenquist decided to quit his job as a billboard painter in New York. It was time to focus exclusively on his art, he decided. Also, two of his colleagues had recently been killed after falling while on a job, as Judith E. Stein writes in her recent biography of the dealer Dick Bellamy. He got to work, and one year later, Rosenquist present bright, brilliant figurative paintings that channel the frenetic energy of postwar American economic expansionism at Bellamy’s Green Gallery on 57th Street, beginning a high-flying career as a cornerstone of Pop art, and postwar art as a whole, that ended yesterday, with his death at the age of 83.

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Like his compatriots Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein, Rosenquist mined popular-culture imagery, collaging it in ingenious fashion in large-scale paintings that offer up large, precisely rendered lipstick tubes, smiling, golden-haired women, and gleaming lightbulbs. Everything is new and clean and perfectly sterile in his pictures. The people and objects aim to please, ready to be purchased, enjoyed, used.



James Rosenquist,
Sitting Around Screaming, 1962.

COURTESY YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY

Rosenquist’s paintings can seem to be the most wholeheartedly affirmative of any made by the Pop artists, but at their best they harbor intense psychological turmoil and doubt just beneath their smooth surfaces. They plumb the hollowness at the core of American prosperity. In Sitting Around Screaming (1962), a painting of a woman’s crossed legs and a hanging lamp is coming apart at its center, barely revealing a woman’s face at a 90-degree angle, as if some sinister secret is being revealed. In Marilyn Monroe, I (1962), the sex symbol’s face is fractured and rotated in different rectangles, in some places of drained of color, as if being dissected by various viewers or dispersed through media channels.

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