Word: rosenquist
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...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...
...quotation that runs from Dada to Pop art -- random citation from the image haze that envelops us, with some T. and A. for signature. Its "relevance" consists only of the accuracy with which it mirrors the inattentiveness of a culture benumbed by television. Its main debts are to James Rosenquist, for the big, juxtaposed image fragments, and to Francis Picabia, for the unassimilated layering of outline images over solid ones in that painter's late, wretchedly bad paintings. But where appropriation is concerned, it is not etiquette to speak of debt...
...also suggested surrealism, and to a degree that Goldman perhaps underrates. Early Rosenquists from 1962--like Noon, Capillary Action or Untitled (Blue Sky), with their small canvases that hover clear of the surface while still carrying the sky or grass of the background--quote Magritte with an almost naive directness. True, Rosenquist could not be less interested in the literary and sexual side of surrealism, but the way disconnected images have always floated together in his work (the duck's head, tire tread and huge cropped face in Silver Skies, 1962; the immense rashers of bacon, their fat glistening among...
Though he was never a "political artist" as such, a political current --generally of a milky, liberal kind--surfaces in Rosenquist's work. It produced a number of bland icons but one real masterpiece as well: F-111, 1965, the 86-ft.-long, multipanel anti-Viet Nam mural that caused a hullabaloo when the Metropolitan Museum chose to exhibit it in the '60s. Unlike most political art of the time, it looks unpolemical at first, and that is the source of its power. It sums up Rosenquist's vision of America as an Eden compromised by its own violence...