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All artworks © James Rosenquist/Licensed by Vaga

James Rosenquist this past summer in his vast Florida studio where he spends much of his working time. He recently completed a group of new paintings there, including "Warp" (2007)," which are on view at the Acquavella gallery in New York this month.

All artworks © James Rosenquist/Licensed by Vaga

The artist in his studio

Robert Rauschenberg Andy Warhol Pablo Picasso Jasper Johns Roy Lichtenstein James Rosenquist Ellsworth Kelly George Grosz

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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.

Yet as the late curator Walter Hopps observes in the catalogue for the 2003 retrospective of Rosenquist’s work Hopps organized for the Guggenheim Museum in New York, despite all the artist shared with contemporaries like Lichtenstein and Warhol, he was always on a very personal path. Beyond his decision to eschew the emphatic flatness of most Pop for intricate three-dimensional environments where his heterogeneous pictorial elements could interact freely, Hopps notes, Rosenquist has always relied on his own remarkable skills as a painter, rather than any mechanical procedures like silkscreen and stencil, to produce his dramatic effects. “He is a superb painter in a very traditional sense,” Hopps writes, “producing very untraditional images.”

Rosenquist’s unconventional approach has served him well over the decades, through shifts toward and against his brand of high-octane conceptual realism. Although his career was briefly sidetracked following a serious car accident in 1971 (his wife and son spent months recovering in the hospital), he was soon painting again, and prolifically, making works whose subject matter continued to range widely through the familiar and exotic, typically mixing both. In Paper Clip, 1973, one of his first major pictures following the accident, he created a vivid choreography of advertising and industrial forms rendered in both bold color and elegant grisaille; the astronomy-themed Star Thief, 1980, a signal work of that decade, turned its attention to the heavens but brought bits of the consumer world (strips of bacon, twisted wires, the face of a fashion model), like metaphysical space junk, along for the ride. And in his extraordinary trio of huge paintings collectively titled The Swimmer in the Econo-mist, commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 1997–98, he reaches simultaneously backward and forward by putting everything from Pop-style product logos and a passage from Picasso’s Guernica into his signature compositional spin cycle. The result is a powerful representation of the informational and material profusion of the late millennium. Rosenquist remains deeply involved in the act of painting—he’s more comfortable describing his favorite brushes and paint cups than speculating about the meaning of his work—a commitment to which the relative solitude of his Aripeka studio is well suited. (Rosenquist still keeps a work space in New York, though his second wife and the couple’s teenage daughter spend most of their time at the family’s home in the countryside north of the city.) In Florida, he has the time and space to throw himself into his work, pausing for few diversions beyond trips to favorite restaurants—we hit both a Thai place and a barbecue joint during my short stay, chauffeured each time by Rosenquist.

The heart of the Aripeka complex is the studio proper, a vast ecosystem composed of stacks of stretched canvases and tables full of paint; finished works wrapped in plastic and carefully set against the wall; a warren of workrooms, office spaces and storage areas holding a department store’s worth of tools and appliances; and a small fleet of vehicles in various states of repair, including several Mercedes sedans and a dusty Ferrari and, just outside, being slowly reclaimed by the junglelike undergrowth, what appear to be the guts of a backhoe and some sort of boat.

During my visit, the studio is also home to a half dozen or so of the new paintings destined for the artist’s show at Acquavella (he joined the gallery in 2003, following a stint at Gagosian)—big, dynamic, boldly colored pictures that immediately announce themselves as “Rosenquists.” With titles like The Infinite Sweep of the Minute Hand, The Hole in the Center of the Clock and Time Blades—Learning Curves (looming more than 8 by 21 feet), they all feature timepieces—melting, distorted, reflected—layered within meticulously rendered webs of something recalling both digital cable and bodily ligaments and surrounded by vectors of energy extending out into space. “I’m getting old,” Rosenquist explains as he shows the works to me. But as we talk, it becomes clear that they are less melancholy meditations on aging than investigations into the relationship of time to space and experience, an attempt to pull together some kind of unified field theory of life devised by one who has, by all accounts, lived it fully.

As we talk about the nuts and bolts of painting—about Rosenquist’s conviction that even the greatest paintings are just “made of minerals mixed in oil, smeared on a piece of cloth with the hair from the back of a pig’s ear”—I recall a moment from the evening before, as we lounged in his living room discussing art history. “Here’s something I think about,” Rosenquist said, gazing off into the distance before fixing his eyes back on me and giving the arm of his chair a slap. “During the Renaissance, if I lived then, would I have been good enough to be a background painter for some of those masters? Why? Because I painted mural after mural—battle scenes and the Vikings for the movies and a bing and a bang and a bing bang boom!” he continued, deploying a favored onomatopoeic exclamation to describe life on the scaffolds of Times Square, before lowering his voice and turning to look out at the Gulf sunset. “I’d like to think that maybe I could have been an apprentice for some Old Master. You know, one wonders how up to snuff you are. That’s the long view.”

"James Rosenquist" originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2007 Table of Contents.