James Rosenquist: A Retrospective

Lipsticks, automobiles, dishwashers, men in business suits, spaghetti, rockets, airplanes, hairdryers, ice cream cones and pigtailed girls. James Rosenquist has always known how to combine these seemingly disparate but always all-American elements into whirlwind, billboard-sized collages of airbrushed surreal euphoria, slamming colors, patterns and objects into one another with the eye of an advertising man and the heart of a Pop artist. This momentous catalogue, published to accompany the first in-depth survey of the artist's work since 1972, will give long-overdue, in-depth attention to Rosenquist's singular achievement in American art. Extensive illustrations cover major works in diverse media, including work on paper that reveals the artist's process, as well as extensive new and archival photography. Essays focus on areas that have only been superficially addressed in the literature to date, bringing the level of Rosenquist scholarship up to that of his Pop Art contemporaries. Curator Walter Hopps provides an overview of the artist's career; Julia Blaut considers the artist's source collages in the context of 20th-century collage; Ruth E. Fine addresses Rosenquist's prints; art collector and former aeronautics researcher Eugene E. Epstein relates the artist's work to scientific phenomena. Also included are a definitive biography, exhibition history and illustrated chronology.

James Rosenquist was born in 1933 at Grand Forks, North Dakota. His family moved to Minneapolis in 1944 and he began to study art four years later. In 1955 he won a scholarship to the Art Students' League in New York, where he first met Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg. During his first years at the school he painted small-format abstract paintings and worked part-time as a driver. His next job saw him made head billboard painter at the ArtKraft -Strauss Corporation; around that same time he produced his pivotal large-scale work President Elect by combining J.F.K.'s face with sex and automobile imagery. The rest is Pop Art history: Rosenquist's first one-man exhibition in 1962 at the Green Gallery sold out. Three years later he made what has come to be considered one of his most important works, the 26-meter-long F-111. In 1968 he was given his first retrospective by the National Gallery of Canada.