James Rosenquist and the Imagery of Pop Art

The defining element of pop art, a movement that reached its zenith in the early 1960s, is its use of imagery derived from popular culture. Perhaps no other artist of the period was as well versed in the culture of the time as was James Rosenquist, who in the 1950s earned his living as a billboard painter. Working first in the Midwest and then in New York City, he was creating the very sorts of images that would later become a staple for him and his colleagues. An examination of the impact of Rosenquist's early experience as a billboard painter on his interpretation of pop art's iconography can help to explain how he evolved into one of the genre's most abstract painters.

Both the process of painting billboards and their overtly commercial subject matter have informed all of Rosenquist's later paintings to some degree. Scale itself, for example, has always been a fundamental aspect of his work, and Rosenquist has probably painted more billboard-sized paintings than any other artist. In fact it was his 86-foot- (26-meter-) long painting F-111 (1964-1965; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) that overwhelmed and captivated the art world, firmly establishing Rosenquist at the forefront of the vibrant pop art movement. He has since painted numerous works on an equally ambitious scale.

To understand Rosenquist's approach to images, it helps to imagine what it is like to be a billboard painter standing on a scaffold: painting up close, on so vast a surface, the painter can deal with only the human-scale portion a few feet ahead--one small section divorced from the overall composition. Even in the case of a resolutely figurative image, like a 20-foot- (6-meter-) tall face, the small piece he or she is working on may appear abstract to the painter, consisting perhaps of a swooping contour defining a jaw and a straighter edge forming a shirt collar just below. Yet the artist must focus on this one element, which may occupy his or her entire field of vision, making it all that matters for that moment.

When one understands the billboard artist's perspective, it comes as no surprise that Rosenquist's paintings often juxtapose isolated and disconnected images or parts of images, sometimes with widely varying scales from one element to the next. He might include an oversized comb, a bowl of spaghetti, soda bottles, pencils, a 1960s car, miscellaneous body parts, or even a portrait of a well-known person. Such subjects, of course, have nothing to do with one another and, as a result, crowd in on one another and jostle for our attention, much like the barrage of images and experiences from the world around us. In the end, what Rosenquist offers the viewer is sensory overload, a kaleidoscopic assault on his or her concentration. On seeing so many images and unrelated objects, the only option open to the viewer is to focus on one small part of the painting at a time.

Because popular culture, in the form of media images, commercial products, and general lifestyle concepts, is so fundamental to the genre, most pop artists approach their subjects in a distinctly head-on fashion. When Wayne Thiebaud paints a delicatessen case full of pastries, or when Tom Wesselmann paints a reclining nude, no commentary is necessary; we understand exactly what we are looking at. Likewise, Andy Warhol's subjects, be they commercial objects such as Brillo boxes or Campbell's soup cans, media images, or even a car crash, are bluntly presented in immediately recognizable forms.

Rosenquist, on the other hand, seems to have a much more ambivalent attitude toward his subject matter. Although his paintings are suffused with recognizable images, the objects he depicts usually seem secondary to the overall impact of the painting. A hand, a face, a car, or a comb may appear prominently, but one never has the sense that the painting is really "about" any of these things. They are merely the objects the artist has chosen to focus on in a particular quadrant of the canvas, and no single part or image feels more important or more central to an overall theme of the painting than any other part. Rosenquist also differed from his contemporaries in technique; whereas Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein, for example, both exaggerated the mechanical aspects of art production--Warhol, through his reproductive silk-screen technique, and Lichtenstein, through his use of dots mimicking crude printing--Rosenquist gloried in the pure painterliness of his work, with the surface receiving as much emphasis as the subject.

A comparison of Rosenquist's painting of Marilyn Monroe with one done by Warhol illustrates the difference in approach. Warhol's image, repeated in many variations, uses vivid 1960s colors and an obviously mechanical process for applying them, but Marilyn herself is presented in a straightforward portrait pose. Rosenquist's Marilyn Monroe I (1962; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) incorporates several portions of the face in various parts of the canvas. Some are upside down; some show us a recognizable mouth, eye, or nose. Yet nowhere do we see a face that we would instantly recognize as that of the famous actress. What we really get from Rosenquist is an impression of Marilyn Monroe rather than a portrait, an impression relayed through quick and partial images, which, taken together, are almost abstract. Indeed, perhaps our most obvious clues to the "sitter's" identity are the block letters ARILY woven through the center of the canvas.

Because popular images form the bedrock of pop art, it is hardly surprising that abstraction, per se, has never figured prominently in the oeuvre of the major pop artists. It is true that Roy Lichtenstein has often painted "abstract paintings," but in his case many of these works are of a specific genre: objectified pop art renditions of abstract subjects. In effect, he takes an abstract image--a brushstroke, for example--and uses it as his subject matter in much the way a still life painter might use a vase of flowers on a tabletop. Rosenquist, however, appears to have pushed in the more unexpected, or even seemingly contradictory, direction, veering much closer to actual abstraction than the concept of pop art would seem to encourage.

Rosenquist's experimentation with the idea of abstraction is much more evident in his later works. While his classic 1960s paintings usually present individual images in clearly defined and easily differentiated spaces--overlapping blocks or squares--the later paintings often have a much more complex organization. For example, in paintings such as Flowers, Fish and Females for the Four Seasons (1984; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), Rosenquist began overlapping images in striated patterns--two images in alternating stripes or spikes over a large area, making both difficult to read. Combined with the artist's tendency to present small objects on such a disorientingly vast scale that we sometimes find even common things difficult to recognize, the result is to create, wholly from the tools of realistic depiction, an image that one reads in almost the same way as one would encounter an image that is straightforwardly abstract. It is for this reason that Rosenquist's work stands out in the chiefly representational genre of pop art.