James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist – Artistic beginnings in commercial painting

James Rosenquist was born on 29 November 1933 in Grand Forks in the US state of North Dakota. His childhood was marked by frequent change of home as his Swedish parents, amateur pilots, moved from town to town in the search of work. His mother also painted, and she encouraged her son to follow his artistic tendencies. Following studies at the University of Minnesota, a scholarship enabled his attendance of the Art Students League in New York. James Rosenquist said later that through tuition from abstract artists like Edwin Dickinson and George Grosz, he had only been interested in pure art, that he wanted to learn how to paint the Sistine Chapel – and thus deliberately avoided commercial art and its tutors. He was no stranger however to commercial painting: At the age of 18, he had a holiday job painting petrol station signs. Even after studying, he had paid his way by painting advertising signs from 1957 to 1960, and celebrated his first successes in commercial painting. 

Fighter bomber with spaghetti, light bulbs, and hairdryers

James Rosenquist gave up sign painting when a friend fell from scaffolding and died. He was determined to move away from commercial painting and to develop his own, unmistakable painting style, but still retained certain principles he had adopted s a sign painter, for example his preference for strong colours and clear contours. He became acquainted with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin during his study time in 1956 and took on many impulses and ideas. He then prepared to become an important trendsetter himself: Time Magazine credited him with playing a major role in defining Pop Art in the 1960s with his distinctive graphic style. The room-filling work F-111 brought James Rosenquist international breakthrough in 1965: Spread across four panels, the work showed the F-111 fighter plane combined with seemingly completely unrelated subjects such as light bulbs, hairdryers, spaghetti with tomato sauce, and a mushroom cloud.

Multi-part pictures tell stories and provide impetus

James Rosenquist loved to tell stories with his pictures in which he combined individual images in a seemingly contradictory way, overlapping like a collage to create a new context. James Rosenquist had mixed feelings about being celebrated as a master of Pop Art. He stressed that this classification was a matter for critics and that he had developed completely independently of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein – he did not want to know anything about belonging to a group. He painted the three-picture work The Swimmer in the Economist for the German Guggenheim in Berlin. James Rosenquist continued to develop his artistic methods throughout his career and exerted a lasting influence on younger generations of artists. A lot of his work was destroyed on 5 April 2009 when his home, studio and warehouse fell victim to a fire. 

James Rosenquist died following an extended illness on 31 March 2017 in New York.