Pop Art

James Rosenquist (November 29, 1933 – March 31, 2017) born at Grand Forks, North Dakota. His family moved to Minneapolis in 1944.
James Rosenquist was a major figure in the 1960s movement known as Pop art. The term "pop" refers to popular culture, which was used as subject matter for both painting and sculpture. In this painting, Rosenquist combines consumer items, such as the laundry detergent Oxydol and the bright red canned spaghetti sauce, with things related to leisure time activities, such as ballet dancers and a picnic table. Seemingly unrelated are a plot of grass, a microphone, and an electric light bulb. A gray wallet and the word "new", which is placed on a bright yellow background and done in relief, reflect important aspects of 1960s America. Everything was "new" in this affluent, mass-producing, and consumer-oriented society.Rosenquist holds the fascination for the way people are constantly bombarded with images, through printed materials, signs, television, movies, and so on. It can be distracting and hinder the ability to focus. Since billboards are read very quickly as cars drive by, there is no need for a lot of detail. Objects must be large and easily identifiable. Rosenquist became intrigued by the fact that while painting a billboard, he could only see a fragment of it at a time. Also, he realized that even an everyday object could attain a certain visual power when enlarged.



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.
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.
1957
He met Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
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.
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.
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.
1967
He moved to East Hampton.
1968
He was given his first retrospective by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
1969
He turned his attention to experimenting with film techniques.
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.
1974 and 1975
He lobbied the 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.
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.

The preference for anonymity in his subjects carried through to the print media. Rosenquist has made a number of screen prints and etchings, but most of his graphics are lithographs. His prints have frequently been exhibited in galleries and museums and at biennials internationally. They can be found in many permanent collections including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. ...

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