{"data":{"id":"1124","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":1124,"topgoose_id":936,"tms_id":1124,"display_name":"James Rosenquist","sort_name":"Rosenquist James","display_date":"1933–2017","begin_date":"1933","end_date":"2017","biography":"\u003cp\u003eOne of the luminaries of Pop art,\nJames Rosenquist came to painting from\ncommercial art: in the late 1950s he\nworked as a billboard painter in Times\nSquare and other locations around New\nYork. By 1960 he had committed himself\nto fine art, imparting the heroic scale,\nstylized forms, and electric hues of his\ntrade to painting.\n\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRosenquist’s iconic works,\nthemselves frequently billboard size,\noften begin as preparatory collages of\nreproductions from magazines. Alterations\nin the shift from mass-media source\nto oil on canvas might include jarring\nchanges in size and scale and the addition\nof high-key color, rendering Rosenquist’s\nprosaic subjects—which coalesce, like\nthose of his Pop contemporaries, around\ndomestic, consumerist, and technological\nthemes—strange and startling. The\nartist’s juxtaposition of disparate images\nacross multiple panels intensifies this effect\nof defamiliarization, placing a burden\non the viewer to distill sense and meaning\nfrom the disjunctive pictorial syntax.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\nIn \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/973\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eU-Haul-It\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, Rosenquist conjoins a\npanel picturing a pocket watch and a pat\nof butter melting in a frying pan with\nanother depicting a series of car chassis at\na factory and a third showing part of the\nU-Haul logo as it might appear on the side\nof a moving van. A range of painterly\nstyles—from exacting illusionism to near\nabstraction—and the use of three different\npanel sizes accentuates the jumble of\nimages. Rosenquist’s cheerful palette may\nmask critical implications—a suggested\ncontinuum between cozy domesticity and\nmass production, for example, or the\nabstracting of corporate logo into gleaming\nreflection—to say nothing of the note of\nurgency added by the watch.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500021855","wikidata_id":"Q448845","created_at":"2017-08-30T15:56:58.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-24T01:33:27.249-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/1124/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/1124/exhibitions"}}}}