Rosenquist's American Images

With James Rosenquist’s large billboards and fragmented montages, it’s hard for any spectator to overlook his works of art.  Some examples of his works consist of famous icons, like John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, to American society and Pop culture.  In addition, he captures Vietnam War in his artwork as well; awareness from what he saw during that time.  Since he doesn’t consider himself a Pop artist, with traditional comic strips and dots, instead he overlaps images with wild colors and a wide variety of mediums.

When Rosenquist started in Abstract Expressionism in the 1950’s, he later became part of the Pop Art culture with artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg.  During the early part of his career, creating huge billboards wasn’t considered art.  Once he brought down the billboards to small canvases, his work was noticeable to critics, spectators, and curators.  Throughout his artistic career, he went on to become one of the notable members of Pop Art.

 

 

In one of his best works, F-111, he expresses a sense of fear during the nuclear threats of the war.  The billboard is 10 feet high and 86 feet long and depicts a F-111 military aircraft, spanning the entire length, with 51 panels of overlapping images. He created this piece on canvas with aluminum and oils of a girl getting her hair done, cake, spaghetti, and a nuclear cloud. It was a sensation during the contemporary Pop Art era and went for $60,000 in 1965. Its location sits the front room of the Leo Castelli Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and Rosenquist explained to American Visions: “I thought of this new war device that’s a defense economy item, supporting aircraft workers, each with two-and-a-half statistical children in Texas or New England or wherever. And I thought that being an artist was insignificant.”

Another political work of art, Campaign 1965, is painted and a lithograph, a print made from stone or a metal plate with a smooth surface. In the lithograph, a saltshaker sprinkling a dove’s tail, and the wallpaper in the background is fruit salad of a military man’s chest that Rosenquist hoped to show peace from the war.  In addition, the Kleenex boxes represent consumer products and used combinations of airbrushing, wallpaper rollers, stencils, and color-separation process as a medium.  A publisher, Tatyana Grosman, founder of Universal Limited Art Editions, helped create this piece during Rosenquist’s 23 day stay at ULAE in New York.  Since Rosenquist opposed war and later was arrested for being a protestor, the public throwing tomatoes at it destroyed the painting.

Rosenquist grabs the American societies attention and his works made him a success in the Pop Art world.  Furthermore, he became a true American artist by documenting what he saw was important to American history.  The popular images he used in his large-scale artwork, he wanted the people of the states to realize what’s happening outside their window and to view art as a progression of actual events during the war and Pop Art era.