ROSENQUIST, James Albert

(b. 29 November 1933 in Grand Forks, North Dakota), artist whose billboard-sized painting F-111 represented the apotheosis of the pop art movement of the 1960s.

The only child of Louis A. Rosenquist, an automotive and aviation mechanic, and Ruth, a homemaker, Rosenquist had a peripatetic early childhood, but in 1944 the family settled down in Minneapolis. He graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1952 and entered the University of Minnesota that autumn. In September 1955 he moved to New York City to continue his education at the Art Students League. After one year, Rosenquist dropped out and took on a variety of jobs, while painting on his own. In 1958 he began working as a billboard painter for Artkraft Strauss, where he met Mary Lou Adams, a textile designer. The two married on 5 June 1960; they had one son. Also in June 1960, Rosenquist's penchant for publicity was in evidence when he met a reporter while painting billboards in Times Square. "These billboards are snake oil stuff. I'm an artist; I paint miniatures," he said, and an article and photograph of the artist on scaffolding soon followed.

By the end of the 1960s Rosenquist had quit Artkraft to focus on his painting, but drew on his billboard experience to "get below zero" in his paintings, beyond the formalist aesthetics of artists such as Frank Stella. "The only way I knew to do that," he recalled, "was to start using imagery again." Rosenquist turned to the media, especially magazine advertisements, for his subject matter. He chose common, everyday things that were immediately familiar to the viewer, fragmenting them within suggestive groupings. As part of a now famous series of interviews entitled "What Is Pop Art?" that the critic Gene Swenson conducted in 1963 with pop artists, Rosenquist recalled, "So I geared myself like an advertiser or a large company to this visual inflation." He added, "It has such impact and excitement in its means of imagery. Painting is probably more exciting than advertising—so why shouldn't it be done with that power and gusto, with that impact."

Rosenquist's first attempt in his new style was President Elect (1960–1961), which pictures, on a large-scaled canvas, a section of President John F. Kennedy's smiling face, a fragment of a woman's hand offering cake, and the side of a nondescript American automobile. Rosenquist was ultimately dissatisfied with this work; he felt that his commentary on the materialism of society was too obvious—too much like an advertisement itself. He brought more subtlety to his next major work, Zone (1960), which has fragments of a woman laughing (or is she crying?), drops of water (perhaps tears), and a dark red tomato. The odd combination of a woman with the fruit has an undercurrent of sexual tension, linking the woman with the idea of a hot tomato.

Rosenquist garnered early attention as part of the wave of general interest in pop artists, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg. In 1961 dealers and curators began visiting Rosenquist's studio, but it was Richard Bellamy of Green Gallery who successfully wooed him. The dealer brought in collectors who wanted to buy Rosenquist's work and set a date for his first solo show. At Green Gallery in February 1962, every painting was sold. Respectability was quickly conferred upon Rosenquist and his colleagues when the gallery owner Sidney Janis included them in his November 1962 exhibition "New Realists," the first major show of these artists as a group. That December, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held a symposium on pop art (a transcript was published in Arts Magazine, April 1963), during which artists and critics took sides in a fierce debate about the merits of pop art that continued to be argued throughout the decade.

In the summer of 1964 Rosenquist began work on a massive painting, F-111. Regarded as one of the most important examples of pop art, it is also the largest and most visually jarring. F-111 is comprised of fifty-one panels that form an eighty-six-foot-long panoramic mélange of disparate images, from that of the fighter jet and its fuselage, which provides the painting's formal structure, to that of the little girl in a hair dryer that resembles the nose of a jet, the mushroom-capped nuclear explosion over which hangs an umbrella, and the field of Franco-American spaghetti in an unappetizing shade of acid orange-red. In his uneasy juxtapositions of imagery, Rosenquist was alluding to more than just the obvious dangers of war and nuclear proliferation; he also was making a point about the ideology of consumption and its ties to the economics of military spending.

Famous even before it was finished, F-111 was exhibited to great fanfare in April 1965 at the Leo Castelli Gallery. The painting filled all four walls of the gallery and engulfed the viewers. It brought on rabid reactions by many critics, who believed the mural debased fine art. On the last day of the show, Robert Scull purchased all fifty-one panels allegedly for $60,000 (the collector received a hefty discount). The sale made the front page of the New York Times. After a three-year international tour that ended at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1968, F-111 aroused more negative commentary from critics who still found it vulgar and superficial. In 1978 the painting was one of the highlights of the Venice Biennale, and in 1984 it was sold at Sotheby's for $2.09 million.

Rosenquist remained within the media glare throughout his subsequent career. After participating in the volatile art market of the 1960s with paintings that commanded high prices, he and other artists found that their early patrons stood to make financial windfalls by selling off their collections during the even hotter art market of the early 1970s. He helped to campaign for resale royalty rights, and the activism of Rosenquist and his colleagues laid the groundwork for later successes with artist copyright laws. In 1976 Rosenquist moved to Aripeka, Florida, a year after his marriage to Adams ended in divorce. On 18 April 1987 he married Mimi Thompson; they had one daughter.

Rosenquist continued to command attention with his work. His 1980 large-scaled mural, Star Thief, commissioned for the Miami International Airport, infuriated the retired astronaut and president of Eastern Airlines, Frank Borman, who led a very public fight against its installation. The incident became a cultural embarrassment for the city. As the critic John Russell responded in the New York Times, the painting was "a characteristically powerful and paradoxical statement by an artist whose best work is often underrated precisely because it looks to be so plain and direct."

The most complete source for biographical information about Rosenquist is Judith Goldman, James Rosenquist (1985), published in tandem with the Denver Art Museum traveling retrospective. The exhibition catalog for IVAM Centre Julio González, James Rosenquist (1991), reprints Rosenquist's most important statements and interviews. For his early work, see the exhibition catalog for Gagosian Gallery by Judith Goldman, James Rosenquist: The Early Pictures, 1961–1964 (1992). See also Susan Brundage, ed., James Rosenquist, Leo Castelli: The Big Paintings, Thirty Years (1994), which reprints some of the critical commentary and several interviews.

Leigh Bullard Weisblat