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James Rosenquist at full scale: it has been four decades since Rosenquist emerged as a central figure in the Pop art movement. A large traveling retrospective prompts a critical appreciation of the artist's steadfast visual inventiveness - Critical Essay
Art in America, Feb, 2004 by Richard Kalina
Pop art in the United States has had a pretty smooth ride. Apart from some predictable anger, dismay and dismissal early on in the game (after all, how could Clement Greenberg or the displaced Abstract Expressionists really be expected to like the stuff?), the movement has enjoyed 40 years of relatively uninterrupted critical, curatorial and commercial success. It has influenced any number of artists along the way--from the Photo-Realists of the '70s to the Graffiti, Nee-Expressionist, and Nee-Gee painters and sculptors of the '80s and '90s to current art stars like Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami and Elizabeth Peyton. Pop art is so pervasive, so much a part of the artistic air we breathe, that hosts of young, patently Pop practitioners are rarely identified as such, much less stigmatized for being derivative. The same benign and transparent influence could scarcely be claimed for Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism or even Minimalism. In addition, the work of the core Pop group and its immediate outriders has retained its esthetic coherence both in its early manifestations and in its subsequent development. There does not seem to be a major push to rethink or revise our ideas about Pop, and the early texts on the subject feel surprisingly to the point.
Some repositioning has occurred. Think, for instance, of how exhibitions in recent years of Andy Warhol's lesser-known "abstract" work--the camouflage, oxidation, Rorschach and shadow paintings among them--have added unexpected depth to our understanding of his post-'60s work; or how, judging by last season's show of drawings at the Whitney, Claes Oldenburg's works on paper have quite possibly proven to be the most vital aspect of his oeuvre. For the most part, however, Pop has kept on a steady but expansive course. Nowhere is this more evident than in the art of James Rosenquist, the subject of a very large, thorough and exuberant retrospective organized by Walter Hopps and Sarah Bancroft. The exhibition started with a joint show at the Menil Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston last spring, moved on to the Guggenheim in New York and ends its run at the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Rosenquist, born in 1933 in North Dakota, has just turned 70. His recent paintings belie his age. Hyperactively ambitious, brimming with visual inventiveness and often hugely scaled (his three-part commission for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Swimmer in the Econo-mist, extends to more than 158 feet), this work furthers an approach to painting begun in the early '60s and continued with unrelenting vigor over the years. Resenquist arrived in New York in the mid-'50s mid followed the normal path for young artists at the time: school (Art Students League), meeting other artists of more or less his generation (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and others), hanging out at the Cedar Tavern with the older Abstract Expressionists and painting energetically moody abstract paintings (several of which are included in the show). Although things were cheaper then, rent still had to be paid and food and art supplies bought. Rosenquist, who had sign- and billboard-painting experience in Minnesota, found work as a billboard painter, rising to be the head painter at Artkraft-Strauss Sign Corporation, one of the leading companies in the field. That experience served him well. Rosenquist's contemporaries were beginning to look out at the world of popular culture and were increasingly engaged with what they saw. Rosenquist became caught up with mass-media imagery, too, and his billboard painting provided him with some important tools: a vocabulary of commercial motifs, the ability to render forms with exactly the right combination of blur and sharp focus, and the experience of dealing with large scale. As Pop art began to coalesce as a movement at the dawn of the '60s, Rosenquist was one of those at its center.
A number of reasons are usually cited to explain the initial appeal and success of Pop art: the replacement of a played-out expressionism, the emergence of a new group of collectors, dealers, critics and curators, and the consolidation of American economic and cultural power. But the most important factor, it seems to me, lay in the making of the art itself. The major movements of the 20th century, got their grip because they provided a significant number of artists with innovative ways to create paintings and sculptures. Artists are, almost invariably, technically skilled. They like making things. What new movements do is provide formal and theoretical channels for this desire. (With Cubism, for example, all that pent-up academic drawing ability--and this includes the knowledge of how, precisely, to draw "clumsily"--was finally released and set on innovative and challenging tasks.) When something really fresh comes along, vistas open up, and suddenly there's lots of new art just waiting to be done. Adding to the sense of promise and urgency is the fact that many other artists--both friends and rivals-are engaged in more or less the same thing. The new art is being made, talked and written about, and shown. The feeling among artists is: let's get going, there's no time to waste. The excitement factor is huge, and this is what art history tends to submerge with its cataloguing and theorizing impulses.
