Biography from Art Cellar Exchange:
| James Rosenquist was destined for artist greatness at an early age. As a junior high student, Rosenquist was awarded a short-term scholarship to the Minneapolis School of Art. Later, after continuing his studies at the University of Minnesota as an undergrad, the artist joined the Art Students’ League. It was here in New York City that Rosenquist became aquatinted with and influenced by artists such as Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg.
In the 1960s Rosenquist began to work in the collage style for which he became famous. During this period in his life, Rosenquist was making a living as a billboard painter. This experience seems to have have had a great influence on both the scale and subject matter of Rosenquist’s subsequent work. Works from this period juxtaposed seeming unrelated images in order to make poignant statements. Building upon the work done by the pioneers of Pop Art, Rosenquist borrowed images from advertising to depict facets of popular culture and draw unexpected conclusions.
In 1962, he painted his most famous work "F-111." At 26 meters wide, the painting is as ambitious in size as it is in message. With bold colors and graphic imagery this canvas examines the often-absurd nature of American life. It possesses ominous depictions of jet fighters (referenced in the title, fire and mushroom clouds intermixed with innocuous images such as a young girl under a hair dryer, a plate of spaghetti and a brightly colored umbrella. As a whole, it exists as a vision of American culture, expressing the bizarre proximity of both euphoria and catastrophe that can be present in a modern culture. The spatial organization of these diametrically opposed objects also alludes to the interrelationship of affluence and aggression.
Rosenquist’s subsequent work continues to focus on themes of importance in the American life such as science, technology and the AIDS epidemic. His artwork has been exhibited at many major galleries and museums throughout the world. Despite the artist’s relative young age, his career has been honored with retrospectives at both the Whitney and Guggenheim Museums. In 1986, the “F-111” canvas sold at Sotheby’s for $2.09 million and is currently valued at a price at least twice that amount. Limited edition printed versions of this piece have recently sold for as much as $72,000 at auction.
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Biography from AskART:
| James Rosenquist was born in 1933 at Grand Forks, North Dakota. His family moved to Minneapolis in 1944. In 1948, he began his studies of art at the Minneapolis Art Institute. In 1953, he continued his studies of painting at the University of Minnesota.
In 1955 he had a scholarship to go to the Art Students' League, New York, where he met Robert Indiana. During this period, he painted small format abstract paintings and worked part-time as a driver. In 1957 he met Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. In 1959 he was at the same drawing class as Claes Oldenburg and was made "head painter" by the Artcraft Strauss Corporation.
He married the textile designer Mary Lou Adams. During the election he produced the picture President Elect in which John F. Kennedy's face is combined in a kind of collage with sex and automobile imagery. His first one-man exhibition in the Green Gallery, in 1962, was sold out. In 1963 he worked on several sculptures, had a number of exhibitions at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, showed his work at the Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, and taught at Yale University. In 1965 he began to work with lithographs.
In the same year he made the 26 meter-wide picture F-111, which was shown at the Jewish Museum, New York, at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and in other European cities. It is one of his most important works. The spatial organization of the composition into layers suggests the interrelationship of contemporary historical symbols and signs of affluence and military hardware, a vision of American culture expressing the proximity of euphoria and catastrophe. In 1967 he moved to East Hampton.
In 1968 he was given his first retrospective by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. In 1969 he turned his attention to experimenting with film techniques. In 1970 he went to Cologne for the opening of his exhibition at the Galerie Rolf Ricke. During the public protest against the Vietnam War he was briefly detained in Washington. During the same year he had comprehensive retrospectives at the Wallraf-Richards Museum, Cologne, and the Whitney Museum, New York.
In 1974 and 1975, he lobbied the U.S. Senate on the legal rights of artists. He became separated from his wife and designed his own house with an open-air studio at Indian Bay, Aripeka, Florida. In 1978 F-111 was exhibited in the International Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In his work of the late seventies and eighties, e.g. 4 "New Clear Women," images of women are confronted with machine aesthetics, usually in large oblong compositions. The themes of these dynamic compositions also include fire, progress and war machinery which he shows in rotating pictorial narratives. Between 1985 and 1987 Rosenquist's entire development as an artist was shown in a comprehensive retrospective at six American museums.
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Biography from AskART:
| James
Rosenquist was born in the dust bowl that was Grand Forks, North Dakota
on November 29, 1933. He lived a nomadic childhood as his father moved
throughout the northern midwest seeking work. Louis Rosenquist was an
ex-pilot and imbued his son with a love of things mechanical. In 1948
James won a scholarship to study at the Minneapolis School of Art; from
1952 to 1955 he studied painting at the University of Minnesota. In
1955 he moved to New York City to study at the Art Students League
because he had won a scholarship. This traditional training was
combined with an apprenticeship painting billboards in New York City.
In
1960 when he was twenty-seven he was ready to abandon billboards for
serious art. As a young sign painter, Rosenquist was considered to be a
"billboard Michelangelo." His debt to Surrealism in his reliance on
seemingly irrational juxtapositions was evident in the majority of his
paintings. He was determined to find an alternative to the Abstract
Expressionism that was so prevalent in New York City. His references
to mass-produced goods, and to magazines, films and other aspects of
the mass media, together with his seemingly anonymous technique, caused
him to be regarded as one of the key figures in the development of Pop
art in the United States.
Rosenquist was married twice and had a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, Mimi Thompson.
Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Sources:
From the Internet, www.artnet.com
ARTnews magazine, March 1986
ARTnews magazine, October 1991
Rosenquist Revisited by Eleanor Heartley in ARTnews magazine, Summer 1986
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James Rosenquist is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Modernism
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