James Rosenquist: His American Life

These seventeen paintings, early 1960s to early 1980s, each so clearly marked by Rosenquist’s experience painting billboards, are pop beyond pop. Riveting indeed and way beyond, each sporting flash points apparently unconnected. “I don’t do anecdote, I accumulate experiences,” says Rosenquist. Right on, and if we think of each anecdote as telling its own story, these works are surely not that. They are accumulations, which accumulate our own experience for we remain fascinated by exactly what is being tied together and with what kind of tie. 

Musing on this, I was gazing at the immense 1980 work Untitled (Between Mind and Pointer), which contains everything kitchen-like: a broken eggshell and, to the right of this remaining eggshell, a bowl displays two egg yolks and surrounding whites, with a bit of bubble to persuade us. Some sort of gadget does its signaling or pointing here and there. Hovering above all this, in the upper right-hand corner, a white short-sleeved shirt shows its pocket as if we might want to place all these disparate elements therein. 

What grabbed me most were the preparatory studies showing what magazine articles and advertisements were used as the sources for the final work. Perfect example: the 1961 composition The Light that Won’t Fail I, in which half of a vapid female face stares up at a comb which expands across the top of the painting like a ceiling, while in the lower right corner a shady figment hovers in a smoky mist. This is based on an ad shown in a newspaper extract about Philip Morris cigarettes, and in the open newspaper, this shadowy figure is smoking a cigarette illustrating the text: “Don’t test one brand alone [. . .] compare them all. Try this test. Take a Philip Morris and any other cigarette. We say [. . .] compare Philip Morris [. . .] match [. . .] judge.” The painterly experience undoes the comparison and simply leaves the figure in shadow, forgetting the smoking action. What remains is the feeling of the ad and the brand’s mantra: this smoke will work, no matter the shadow.