James Rosenquist: A Retrospective

Lipsticks, automobiles, dishwashers, men in business suits, spaghetti, rockets, airplanes, hairdryers, ice cream cones and pigtailed girls. James Rosenquist has always known how to combine these seemingly disparate but always all-American elements into whirlwind, billboard-sized collages of airbrushed surreal euphoria, slamming colors, patterns and objects into one another with the eye of an advertising man and the heart of a Pop artist. This momentous catalogue, published to accompany the first in-depth survey of the artist's work since 1972, will give long-overdue, in-depth attention to Rosenquist's singular achievement in American art. Extensive illustrations cover major works in diverse media, including work on paper that reveals the artist's process, as well as extensive new and archival photography. Essays focus on areas that have only been superficially addressed in the literature to date, bringing the level of Rosenquist scholarship up to that of his Pop art contemporaries. Curator Walter Hopps provides an overview of the artist's career; Julia Blaut considers the artist's source collages in the context of twentieth-century collage; Ruth E. Fine addresses Rosenquist's prints; art collector and former aeronautics researcher Eugene E. Epstein relates the artist's work to scientific phenomena. Also included are a definitive biography, exhibition history and illustrated chronology.