In the Studio: James Rosenquist

ARIPEKA, Fla.—It’s a sultry summer morning in Aripeka, a dot of a town on the marshy Florida coast around an hour north of Tampa. From the blanketing humidity to the hazy orange sky to the old trees dripping with dun garlands of moss, everything about the scene suggests a certain swampy languor. Yet at the end of a long driveway, inside two mammoth buildings, James Rosenquist’s busy studio is already open for business. Or almost open—first there is coffee, strong and milky and ferried in a saucepan from the nearby main house by the artist himself.

Slowed a bit by age but still sharp and feisty, Rosenquist, 73, is working on a show of new paintings, on view at Acquavella Galleries, in New York, through December 14. He makes sure the coffee cups of his office staff are filled before inviting me to join him in his airplane-hangar-size open-air studio complex. Here, in a small area walled off with plastic, in which a hulking air conditioner struggles to lighten the thick Gulf air, the painter is in an expansive mood. He continues a conversation we began the previous day, liberally salting a discussion of his recent output with reminiscences from his early years in New York and tales of his evolution from struggling art student to expert sign painter to contemporary-art icon.

“I’ve had a lot of ups and downs,” Rosenquist says as he considers the somewhat improbable trajectory of his life. “I just feel lucky that I’ve been able to make a living by doing any damn thing I feel like.” Born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1933, he grew up an only child, his parents moving from one small middle-American community to another in search of work. They finally settled in Minneapolis, where Rosenquist’s mother, an amateur painter, encouraged her son’s artistic interests. A watercolor entered in a contest won the teenager a chance to spend a month of Saturdays studying at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; a few years later, Rosenquist enrolled in the University of Minnesota to concentrate on art in earnest. Meanwhile, he had already found a way to use his considerable talent with a brush to earn something, working a summer job with a crew he remembers as some “pretty tough guys, nutty guys” painting signs for Phillips 66 and Coca-Cola along the back roads of the Midwest.

It wasn’t long before Rosenquist began to chafe at the limited opportunities he saw for himself in Minneapolis. The 21-year-old won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York, leaving college and arriving in the city in the fall of 1955 with $300 in his pocket. He spent the year soaking up the cosmopolitan atmosphere and studying with artists such as Edwin Dickinson, George Grosz and Robert Beverly Hale, but by the spring he was broke. After a scary stretch of being functionally homeless, he found his way back to his old profession, this time on a larger scale: painting signs across New York City, from hot-dog and beer ads in Coney Island to billboard-size promotional images for Hollywood movies on buildings high above Times Square.

The days Rosenquist spent on these large commercial paintings—he quit in 1960 after a coworker fell to his death on the job—were instrumental in the development of his mature style. “I was trying to gather the essence of an idea,” he says of the early 1960s, when he was working in his Lower Manhattan loft in the legendary building at 3–5 Coenties Slip, where his neighbors included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly and, just around the corner on Pearl Street, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. “My idea was to do a new kind of picture that spilled out the front of the picture plane, instead of receding. Every painting in history had always been like looking out an aperture. But because of this advertising, which I hated, I wanted to try putting fragments of realistic objects into space and having the biggest one be so big you couldn’t quite tell what it was. I just wanted to make a mysterious painting. I still don’t know if I ever succeeded, but it was a feeling I had.”

If he was not sure of his success, many others were, and soon he was showing his “new kind” of pictures to an appreciative audience in New York galleries—first in Richard Bellamy’s trailblazing Green Gallery and then with his longtime dealer, Leo Castelli and beyond. Over the next several decades, Rosenquist would create works whose look and sensibility were unprecedented, epitomized by the colossal F-111, 1964–65. This radically complex, 10-by-86-foot painting (now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York) juxtaposes fragments including a hair dryer and a plate of spaghetti with a mushroom cloud and the fuselage of the eponymous fighter jet, all set in a dizzying space of delicious saturated color and depicted with dazzling figurative precision. With their exaggerated scale, brash palette and mass-media subjects scrambled together like a digital mash-up predicting a moment 40 years in the future, F-111 and his other paintings of the period marked Rosenquist as one of the leading figures of the rapidly ascending cultural phenomenon known as Pop art.