PORTRAIT OF A POP MASTER

Artists are rarely as expressive on the page as they are on canvas. James Rosenquist is a fine exception. Avis Berman reviews his memoir ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Few modern artists deign to write their life stories, often insisting that their art speaks for itself. They have a point. All works of art are in some way autobiographical, though the personal clues conveyed are often oblique.

The artist most unlikely to reflect on the page is a famous one. An international art star's personal demons or demanding professional schedule leave little time for sustained introspection. Nevertheless James Rosenquist, one of the original Pop painters (a designation he dislikes), has completed a lively and accessible account of his life and career, called "Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art". Emerging in the early 1960s along with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Rosenquist helped to define the art of the decade.

Born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1933, Rosenquist spent his childhood on farms there and in Minnesota. This landscape had an invaluable effect on his development as an artist. In the Midwest, the "mundane and the bizarre can fuse into a language of images that float to the surface when you least expect it," he writes.

Throughout Rosenquist's childhood, "the strangeness of things made a great impression" on him. The hospital where he was born was later turned into a Chinese restaurant. His great-grandfather died during the winter, when the ground in North Dakota was too hard for a burial. The family kept the corpse in a coffin on their porch until the temperature warmed up. Every day as he went off to school, Rosenquist would chirp, "Bye-bye, Grandpa, see you later!"

By the time he was a teenager, he perceived the world as a string of disconnected visions, brought together for an unknown purpose.

After graduating from the University of Minnesota, where he studied painting, he won a scholarship to attend the Arts Students League in New York. He supported himself as a billboard painter, depicting everything from Hebrew National salamis in Brooklyn to Castro Convertibles sofas in Manhattan—an enormous sign that once dominated the intersection of 47th Street and Broadway. These assignments offered their own education: he learned how to mix colours, scale small drawings into enormous scenes, and observe the refraction of light.

The conjunction of odd pictures on billboards also helped inspire his own signature paintings. His work tends to feature incongruously collaged images, often taken from advertisements and steeped in Surrealism.

On one billboard job, he "painted an autumn leaf twice as big as a large living room, with a can of beer in the middle of it.” That was a natural prelude to canvases like "President Elect" (1960-61), in which a campaign portrait of John F. Kennedy is juxtaposed with a fragment of a Chevrolet and a separate manicured hand holding a piece of chocolate cake. And "Lanai" (1964), an enigmatic painting of luscious canned peaches, an upside-down Buick, a bubble-gum pink nude, and the top half of a pencil.

Rosenquist’s billboard work included portraits of film stars such as Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck, their faces 20 feet high, their noses ten feet tall. He found that realistically rendered imagery could appear abstract if the scale was sufficiently distorted. "The images," he writes, "were so large that all I could see were their textures and forms: ...the white creases on an Arrow shirt looked like the face of Mont Blanc."

In 1960, the year before Warhol and Lichtenstein formulated their breakthrough styles, Rosenquist appropriated the imagery and techniques of advertising to create something of his own. The title of his book derives from his quest for a completely non-objective style of painting, or "zero painting". Rosenquist concluded that if a zero painting consisted of pure colour and pure form, absent references or associations, he could go "below zero" by using representational objects solely for their colour and shape, but removed from their conventional meaning.

Word got round about these strange new paintings, which attracted Richard Bellamy, an avant-garde New York art dealer, and Robert Scull, an early Pop collector. Rosenquist's reputation was sealed when he joined the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1964. For his first show there a year later, he filled the space with “F-111”, a wraparound painting that was recognised as a powerful commentary on America's military technology. It was later acquired by New York's Museum of Modern Art.

In his book, Rosenquist delivers incisive vignettes about Warhol, Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, and especially the late Robert Rauschenberg, who remained raffish and ready to carouse to the end. "He was always raucous, he was a party guy, he would show up at a party at the drop of a hat," Rosenquist recalls. "When I had my retrospective in Bilbao, Spain [in 2004, a 79-year-old Rauschenberg] showed up in his wheelchair! I couldn't believe it. I said, 'Bobby what are you doing?' He says, 'I came for the party.' "

Rosenquist writes in an episodic, free-associative manner, arranging information like the jumbled narratives of his paintings. He devotes a great deal of space to the genesis of his methods and important works, which are generously illustrated throughout the book. He is also an unsung raconteur, a natural if meandering storyteller. "I remember when I had a show in London," he writes. The newspapers "said, 'Two Americans in town this week: Winslow Homer and James Rosenquist.' I thought, Did they dig Winslow up, or am I dead?"

Rosenquist makes a compelling case for his method of layering images. "Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life," he writes. "The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind. If, for example you take a walk through midtown Manhattan, you might in quick succession see a street vendor, the back of a girl's legs, [and] a taxi as it comes close to hitting you. You see parts of things and you rationalize them into a scenario."

“Painting Below Zero”, written with David Dalton, is not only Rosenquist's life story. It is also a detailed handbook packed with vivid insight into how one very innovative artist sees the world, and understands his own place in it.

"Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art", by James Rosenquist with David Dalton. Illustrated. 370 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $50.

(Avis Berman is a writer and art historian. She directs the oral history project of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. Her last article for More Intelligent Life was a review of "Rogues' Gallery", Michael Gross's exposé of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Picture Credit: t_a_i_s, San Sharma (both via Flickr)