The Pop Art Era
By Deborah Solomon
Published: New York Times, Sunday Book Review, December 13, 2009

PAINTING BELOW ZERO Notes on a Life in Art By James Rosenquist with David Dalton Illustrated. 370 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $50

POP The Genius of Andy Warhol By Tony Scherman and David Dalton
Illustrated. 509 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $40

ANDY WARHOL By Arthur C. Danto
Illustrated. 162 pp. Yale University Press. $24

Pic at top of story from “Painting Below Zero”
James Rosenquist with his mother and an early creation from his sign-painting days in Minnesota, 1954.

Is it possible for an artist to make a painting that is not informed by his own life? The Pop artists were initially both reviled and celebrated for refusing to make art about their “feelings.” When Andy Warhol silk-screened an image of a Campbell’s soup can onto a canvas, the impetus for art seemed to have shifted from the murk of the unconscious to the brightly lighted aisles of the supermarket. Pop Art was initially described as ironic, impersonal, emotionally cool — pick your favorite synonym for “refrigerated.”

Left - From “Pop”
Andy Warhol, on the marquee and under it, third from right, 1967.

Yet it has been a half-century since Pop Art emerged, and it may be time to retire the clichés that still pervade so much of the writing about the movement’s main figures. James Rosenquist is among them. His best-known work, “F-111” (1964-65), is an epic, multi-panel painting in which the sleek fuselage of a fighter bomber nose-dives into disparate images of an angel food cake, a Firestone tire and a mound of canned-style spaghetti. For all its jokey references, the painting is a powerful deconstruction of the American dream, questioning the connection between affluence and war. It ought to be obvious by now that there is more creative heat in Rosenquist’s “F-111” than in countless Abstract Expressionist paintings that were hyped in their time as marvels of raw emotion, if only because they offered improvised-looking drips and splashes in place of the patient description of the real world.

“Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art” is an amiable and rambling autobiography in which Rosenquist presents himself as a kind of accidental Pop artist, a painter from the flat plains of the Midwest whose work happens to overlap thematically, through no fault of his own, with that of Warhol. He resents being pigeonholed as a Pop artist, with the vaguely dissolute intimations of hands-off picture making and hands-on socializing. “I wanted to make mysterious pictures,” he proclaims, implicitly allying himself with French Symbolist poets. He points out that he did not meet up with Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein until 1964, a few years after each of them had arrived independently at a style of painting that returned realism to avant-garde art. Rosenquist actually started life as a sign painter, and his achievement was to import the billboard aesthetic into high art.

There’s a wonderful photograph in the book, circa 1954, that attests to Rosenquist’s early love of road signs. It was taken outdoors, on an empty street in Minneapolis. The artist, then a tall, lanky man around 21, and his proud mom stand side by side, looking upward. Above them looms a giant billboard for Coca-Cola, one of the first Rosenquist ever painted. It is a genuinely captivating work, a roadside Magritte in which various unrelated objects (an arrow, a shapely glass of soda, a fashionable woman in a hat and gloves) float dreamily against a cloud-laced sky.
The full review NYT.