Word: rosenquist
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There are pure painters and there are American painters, and James Rosenquist, a survey of whose work since 1961 fills a floor of New York City's Whitney Museum this summer, is decidedly one of the latter. What other artist in the past 25 years has scanned the American scene more faithfully or brought such a compelling if fractured narrative out of its weird slippages and layerings of imagery? In the heyday of pop art, there was more stress on Rosenquist's means and less on his ends. One saw the devices from advertising, the billboard manner; one felt affronted...
Looking at a big Rosenquist (a small one is 10 ft. wide, and Star Thief, 1980, the mural whose installation at Miami International Airport was successfully opposed by Frank Borman, then president of Eastern Airlines, is 17 ft. by 46 ft.) is a bit like seeing one of the lost panoramas that were so popular in 19th century America scrolling creakily past, a journey re-created as spectacle, stripped of its pastoral imagery and retooled in terms of media glut. Hey, look! you hear the nasal voice of the artist saying: this is what the banks of the electronic Mississippi...
Born in North Dakota in 1933, Rosenquist backed into being a painter through grass-roots advertising: he started painting Phillips 66 signs for a Minnesota paint contractor and gradually moved up to supporting himself as a billboard artist in New York City in the 1950s. Turning out these mammoth images, high above the city streets, had the most obvious connection to his later art: the problem of how you make something that looks perfectly realistic a quarter- mile away when you are close up against it and cannot see it as a whole. The huge fragmentary paintings...
...practitioner in the U.S., among those born after 1950, is David Salle, 32. His main compositional device, putting emblems over a tangle of "transparent" figures, came straight from late Francis Picabia and perhaps from Salle's German contemporary Sigmar Polke. There is also a strong debt to earlier James Rosenquist. Salle draws, or rather traces, awkwardly and flatly. His imagery mimics the nullifying influence of TV, its promotion of derisive inertia as the hip way of seeing. Underneath, a congealed eroticism, derived from the misogynies of soft porn and the misty cliches of romance-illustration; on top, a disconnected shuffle...
Larry Rivers depicts The Accident in a curiously detached, deadpan manner. The faces on scores of superb photographs are filled with ennui. James Rosenquist's 1960-61 billboard-like painting President Elect portrays John F. Kennedy as metallic, slick and cold as the 1963 Corvette...