Word: rosenquist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...JAMES ROSENQUIST, artist...
Since Picasso's Guernica, few artists had attempted historical commentary. Robert Rauschenberg did in his silkscreen paintings of the early '60s, and so did James Rosenquist with big quasi-dioramas like The F-111, his reflection on the Vietnam War. Kitaj differs from both, for he wanted to paint his images all the way through, not transfer them out of mass media. It's odd that in the midst of all the talk about "appropriation" that went on through the '80s and into the '90s, Kitaj's name so seldom came up in New York: for this is a painter...
...other hand, the early work of James Rosenquist and Claes Oldenburg has lost none of its power. With Oldenburg the vitality comes from his wild metaphors of the world as body -- hard things drooping into softness, small things turning mountainous, a vision that seems to reach back to Bruegel and can make a crude enlarged plaque of some cuts of supermarket meat look like the site of a massacre. With Rosenquist, it is the crude oppositions, engrossing in their pure Americanness. The woman's face rising out of an orange swamp of spaghetti in I Love You with My Ford...
...There are shallow passages: the bay devoted to Russian Constructivism, Futurism and the Bauhaus, for instance, is mingy. Yet many excellent works of art proliferate, from Cubist collages to exquisite, large-scale paintings by Cy Twombly and some of Robert Rauschenberg's early combines, like Rebus, 1955; from James Rosenquist's room- size F-111, 1964-65, and a reassembly of some of the passionate, gaudy fragments from Claes Oldenburg's Store of 1961-62 to Brancusi's phallic bronze, Princess X, 1916, and one of the greatest of all Legers, The City...