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Rosenquist was born in 1933 at Grand Forks, North Dakota. His family moved to Minneapolis in 1944 and soon after he began his studies of art at the Minneapolis Art Institute (1948). In 1953 he continued his studies of painting at the University of Minnesota. In 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. In 1957 he met Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. In 1959 he was at the same drawing class as Claes Oldenburg and was made "head painter" by the Artcraft Strauss Corporation where he painted billboards. 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 1962 at the Green Gallery sold out. In 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. In 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 Europen 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. In 1967 he moved to East Hampton. In 1968 he was given his first retrospective by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. In 1969 he turned his attention to experimenting with film techniques. In 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. In 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. In 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 development as an artist was shown in a comprehensive retrospective at six American museums. (Based on the biography at WWW.PopArt)
In a 1972 artforum (June 1972) interview with Jeanne Siegel that took place shortly before the opening of his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Rosenquist commented, "The imagery was expendable to me but it was the color and texture that I was interested in, for instance, if I thought I felt like painting red I might have painted a great big tomato." When Jeanne Siegel observed, "Nevertheless, certain images are recurrent, for example body fragments -particularly hands, automobiles, and food," James Rosenquist said, "Hands for me have always been sort of an offering, a suggestion saying two cents off, buy this, try a new steam iron. They had to do with advertising, and advertising, as I said before, was like the power on the street that a lot of money was poured into, to make something bright and flashy, to make something go. And that was a powerful gesture that people would recognize, so if I put them in a painting, they would see them and they couldn't mistake them for a crucifix because it would be a hand offering something. I used that imagery so it wouldn't be mistaken for something else. As for automobiles and car parts, I was brought up with automobiles in the Midwest and I used to know the names of all of them. I came here and spent some time in New York and I didn't know anything that was stylish. I found myself standing on the corner, and things going by, and I couldn't recognize anything and that wasn't only automobiles. There were a lot of other things and I began to feel that what was precious to my thing was what I could remember."
Rosenquist's art has long been featured at galleries and museums; the Guggenheim has announced that its first exhibit in its newly-reconstructed exhibition spaces will be a James Rosenquist Retrospective in Fall 2002. Rosenquist's works are in the permanent collections of such museums as the Guggenheim Museums in NY, Bilbao, and Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Chicago Art Institute, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Detroit Institute of Art, USC Annenberg School for Communication. Rosenquist's art has long been featured at galleries and museums; the Guggenheim has announced that its first exhibit in its newly-reconstructed exhibition spaces will be a James Rosenquist Retrospective in Fall 2002.
Selected Bibliography: Craig Adcock and the artist, James Rosenquist (Valencia: IVAM, Centre Julio Gonzelez, 1991); Leo Castelli, James Rosenquist: The Big Paintings (NY: Rizzoli, 1994); Roberto Daniani, James Rosenquist: Gli Anni Novanta (Trieste: Charta, 1992); Henry Geldzahler, James Rosenquist at Gemii 1980 - 1982: The Glass Wishes " When a Leak..."(Los Angeles: Gemini G.E.L., 1983); Constance W. Glenn, James Rosenquist: Time Dust: Complete Graphics: 1962-1992 (University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach and Rizzoli International Publications, 1993); Judith Goldman, James Rosenquist (New York: Viking, 1985); Judith Goldman, James Rosenquist: Welcome to the Water Planet and the House of Fire, 1988- 1989 (NY: Tyler Graphics, 1989), Ivan C. Karp, James Rosenquist (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1968); James Rosenquist, James Rosenquist (Comune di Trieste: Civico Museo Revoltella, 1995); James Rosenquist, James Rosenquist (Denver: The Denver Art Museum, 1985); James Rosenquist, Rosenquist in Moscow 1961-1991 (Tampa, Florida: Klay Printing, 1991); Marcia Tucker, James Rosenquist (NY: Whitney Museum, 1972); Elayne H. Varian James Rosenquist Graphics Retrospective (Sarasota: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 1979; Wallraf-Richartz-Museums, James Rosenquist. Gemalde-Raume-Graphik (Koln: Kunsthalle, 1972); John Yau, James Rosenquist: Never Mind from Thoughts to Drawing (NY: ULAE, 1990).
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