James Rosenquist, Pop Art pioneer, dies at 83

James Rosenquist, a pioneering figure of Pop Art, died on April 1, 2017, at age 83 after a long illness. Born on November 29, 1933, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, he moved to New York in the mid-1950s, where he encountered Abstract Expressionists and later artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. Alongside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Rosenquist helped define Pop Art in the context of Vietnam War-era America, advertising, and consumer culture. His most famous work, F-111 (1965), is a monumental 23-panel oil painting measuring about 3 by 26 meters, originally installed at Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan. The work juxtaposes a fighter jet, atomic bomb imagery, and consumer symbols like spaghetti, light bulbs, and a hair dryer, reflecting America's convulsive and contradictory nature. Rosenquist distinguished himself from Warhol by using generic, unbranded images to create a new kind of painting, as he stated in a 2007 interview: "I used generic images without a brand to make a new genre of painting." His 2009 memoir, "Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art," elaborates on his approach. In 2016, a major retrospective was held at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris. F-111, part of the Museum of Modern Art's collection, was featured in the exhibition "From the Collection: 1960-69" at MoMA, which closed on March 19, 2017.