James Rosenquist

Grand Forks, ND, 1933 -

BiographyAmerican painter, printmaker and sculptor. While still at school in 1948 he won a scholarship to study at the Minneapolis School of Art, and from 1952 to 1955 he studied painting at the University of Minnesota. In 1955 he moved to New York to study at the Art Students League on a scholarship. He earned his living as a billboard painter from 1957, and in 1960 he began to apply similar techniques of grossly enlarged and fragmented images to huge paintings such as President Elect (oil on masonite, 2.13*3.66 m, 1960–61; Paris, Pompidou), in which the glamorous face of John F. Kennedy is combined with the side of a 1950s car and a hand holding a piece of cake painted in grey as if it were a black-and-white photograph. Rosenquist’s debt to Surrealism in his reliance on seemingly irrational juxtapositions was evident in the majority of his paintings, for example in I Love you with my Ford (oil on canvas, 2.10*2.38 m, 1961; Stockholm, Mod. Mus.), which in its three horizontal registers includes the image of the front of a car, a close-up of lovers kissing and a garishly coloured tangle of tinned spaghetti. His references, however, to mass-produced goods and to magazines, films and other aspects of the mass media, together with his dispassionate and seemingly anonymous technique, caused him to be regarded as one of the key figures in the development of Pop art in the USA.

From Grove Dictionary of Art

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