James Rosenquist

Rosenquist was born on November 29, 1933, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, Talking about his experience at the Art Students League, Rosenquist said "I studied only with the abstract artists. They had commercial artists there teaching commercial work, I didn't bother with that. I was only interested in – see, here's how it started. I was interested in learning how to paint the Sistine Chapel. It sounds ambitious, but I wanted to go to mural school". While studying in New York, Rosenquist took up a job as a chauffeur, before deciding to join the International Brotherhood of Painters and Allied Trades. As a member of the union, Rosenquist would paint billboards around Times Square, ultimately becoming the lead painter for Artkraft‐Strauss and painting displays and windows across Fifth Avenue. By 1960, Rosenquist abandoned painting signs after a friend died by falling from scaffolding on the job. Instead of working on commercial pieces, he chose to focus on personal projects in his own studio, developing his own distinct style of painting that retained the kind of imagery, bold hues, and scale that he utilized while he painted billboards. ==Career==

Rosenquist's career in commercial art began when he was 18, after his mother encouraged him to pursue a summer job painting. He started by painting Phillips 66 signs, going to gas stations from North Dakota to Wisconsin. After leaving school, Rosenquist took a series of odd jobs and then turned to sign painting. "I painted billboards above every candy store in Brooklyn. "I got so I could paint a Schenley whiskey bottle in my sleep", he wrote in his 2009 autobiography, Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art. In 2003, art critic Peter Schjeldahl asked of Rosenquist's application of sign painting techniques to fine art thus: "[W]as importing the method into art a bit of a cheap trick? So were Warhol's photo silk-screening and Lichtenstein's lining of panels from comic strips. The goal in all cases was to fuse painting aesthetics with the semiotics of media-drenched contemporary reality. The naked efficiency of anti-personal artmaking defines classic Pop. It's as if someone were inviting you to inspect the fist with which he simultaneously punches you." But Rosenquist said the following about his involvement in the Pop Art movement: "They [art critics] called me a Pop artist because I used recognizable imagery. The critics like to group people together. I didn't meet Andy Warhol until 1964. I did not really know Andy or Roy Lichtenstein that well. We all emerged separately." In 1971 Rosenquist came to South Florida after receiving an offer from Donald Saff, dean of the University of South Florida's College of Fine Arts, to participate in the school's Graphicstudio, a collaborative art initiative. In the years following Rosenquist remained a key contributor to the studio, cooperating with students and other artists and producing numerous works of his own, ultimately creating his Aripeka studio in 1976. Rosenquist's paintings have been on display in the lobby of Key Tower in Cleveland, Ohio. His F-111 was displayed there for many years. After his acclaim, Rosenquist produced large-scale commissions. This includes the three-painting suite The Swimmer in the Econo-mist (1997–1998) for Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany, and a painting that was planned for the ceiling of the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, France. ==Works==

Zone: A key work in the development of his signature style, Rosenquist cites his 1961 work Zone as a turning point in the development of his own personal aesthetic, with the piece being the first to employ monumental scale, a recurring aspect of Rosenquist's art that is exemplified in his many murals. Zone also served as a stepping stone in Rosenquist's body of work in that it served as a departure from his previous works, which saw him move away from previous experiments in Abstract Expressionism, with the picture being described by Rosenquist as his first pop piece. Standing at around twenty-six meters wide and three meters across twenty-three canvases, the painting's scale evokes Rosenquist's work on billboards, illustrating a life-sized depiction of the F-111 Aardvark aircraft. Rosenquist juxtaposes imagery derived from the appropriated advertisements with the aircraft, including broken light bulbs near the plane’s cockpit and the hood of the hairdryer positioned very close to the plane, resembling destructive military weapons. Rosenquist uses the painting to question and prompt conversation about the role of mass consumerism and coverage of the war in the media. ==Honors==

Rosenquist received numerous honors, including selection as "Art In America Young Talent USA" in 1963, appointment to a six-year term on the Board of the National Council of the Arts in 1978, In 2002, the Fundación Cristóbal Gabarrón conferred upon him its annual international award for art, in recognition of his contributions to universal culture. Beginning with his first early-career retrospectives in 1972 organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Rosenquist's work was the subject of several gallery and museum exhibitions, both in the United States and abroad. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum organized a full-career retrospective in 2003, which travelled internationally, and was organized by curators Walter Hopps and Sarah Bancroft. His F-111, shown at The Jewish Museum in 1965, was mentioned in a chapter of Polaroids from the Dead by Douglas Coupland. ==Art market==

The highest selling painting by the artist was Be Beautiful (1964), sold at Sotheby's by $3,301,000, on 14 May 2014. ==Personal life==

Rosenquist married twice and had two children. he had one child: John. ==Death==

Rosenquist died at his home in New York City on March 31, 2017, after a long illness; he was 83 years old. His survivors include his wife, Thompson; one daughter, Lily; one son, John; and a grandson, Oscar. ==References==