I’ve
known James Rosenquist; but to know the man is not to know the man. I know some
things, but that’s about it. Nor do I know the work better than someone who
never met the man. Perhaps, in that sense, I know Michelangelo better than I
know Rosenquist, because I have studied his life and work intensively.
Anyway,
I knew of Jim, his work, before I knew him. My first glimpse came when Sam
Hunter, the founding director of the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University,
acquired, during my senior year in 1963, Two 1959 People
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>, as part of the
prescient Gevirtz-Mnuchin Purchase Fund. That painting, which combined two
faces, a slice of bread, a cartoon of a section of a row boat drawn in black
line on red, a license plate with the number 0-0000 dated 1959 (no state), some
wall paper design applied with a roller, and a fishing pole with line attached
to the top edge, has held its own and accrued greatly in value. It was the
fishing pole that got to me as an undergraduate. Later, I wrote about another
important work by Rosenquist. In Boston, at the Institute for Contemporary Art,
he had created an enormous, vertical Fire Slide
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>, which offered the
notion that some giant could descend from heaven into a huge Buckminster Fuller
dome.
That
same year, I met the artist himself at a Warhol opening, and he hired me to
work part-time in his studio. The experience was more and less than I expected.
Jim would work feverishly, night and day, and then call me and a couple of
other guys to come and clean up the studio. Nobody was ever around when he
actually painted, but now and then there were multiple projects we worked on.
One time, for example, he taught us how to make light socket attachments for
some "chandeliers" he was mass-producing. Another time, a gang of us
made stripe paintings for some medals he was going to display on a float, in an
anti war parade. They were all destroyed.
There
were long drives to East Hampton and time after work when Jim would feed the
men– mostly burgers– and pass out tin cups for our daily ration of grog. The
other guys would nod off while I tried to engage Jim about his art. It was
tricky. Mostly he preferred to be the foreman or boss of the crew and we were
the men, the workers. Jim tended not to wax philosophical. Which is why I split
my side laughing at the stupid pretentious art-speak in the lengthy, pompous
wall label at the Guggenheim next to his most famous piece, "F-111."
It attributed to the artist all kinds of absurd notions.
Jim
may indeed have had some of those thoughts in his head, deep down, real deep
down, but he never talked that way. In the back seat of his car, I once found a
journal of philosophy, and so, I kindah outed him on that. I talked to him about
psychedelic art, a term that had not yet been coined, and Eastern mysticism. He
said that he had done some early Mandala paintings that I never saw.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Mostly, Rosenquist preferred to speak
of himself as a kind of art worker, a sign painter and straight kid from the
Mid-West somewhere who came to the Big Apple and got a gig painting those huge
billboards in Times Square. He told me vividly of the day a friend died and the
foreman watched him fall, paused, went into the trailer and punched out his
time card. Jim quit after that and used the techniques of a commercial sign
painting to become one of the founding members of the Pop generation. It was a
brilliant move. But Jim, a simple, down to earth guy, a worker, conveyed to me
some of the wonder and confusion of being an art star. He was a pretty straight
family man with a wife, Mary Lou, who I met only once, and a kid. He would talk
about being caught up in the glitter of the international art world and its
sordid temptations– which he staunchly resisted, even if they clearly intrigued
him.
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:blue’>Cut here for print
version
So
it was with much nostalgia and expectation, then that I found myself at the
current Rosenquist retrospective exhibit at the Guggenheim museum.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> I should say, first of all, that I tend
to rebel: I always tour the Guggenheim Museum from the top down in reverse
order of the installation by taking the elevator to the top level. Then I
titubate down through the exhibition, which I find more pleasant than slogging
my way uphill. In the current exhibition,
this had an unexpected benefit. It clearly emphasized that after a long and
productive career that started in the 1960s, the artist is now doing his very
best work. The paintings of the past few years have never been richer or more
brilliant in their color, mastery of the brush, flickering trompe l’oeil
trickery, fracturing or layering of space; not to mention the intensity of
their pop culture iconography. These often epic-scaled murals, several of them
in those white-cube sidebar galleries, were just brilliant and stunning. If he
is not among the greatest artists of our time, a difficult and complex debate,
he is surely on the short list of greatest living painters.
One
of the pleasures of this show was its inclusion of the small collages he made
to work up the murals. Several of the studies for "F-111" were a
revelation. I had always wondered how the smiling kid ended up under the huge
hair drier. It was also wonderful once again to see the dolls wrapped in
cellophane from a 1993 show at Castelli; that was the breakthrough that got him
back on track from the dry period that preceded it when Rosenquist was making
Rosenquists.
Nevertheless,
my slow, descending spiral through the nine circles of the man’s career all too
clearly revealed some bumps in the road back through time. I was surprised at
how flat and crudely painted those seminal Pop works from the early 1960s were.
They were the works that established his reputation but, in hindsight, the
surfaces seem dull and matte compared to the sumptuous flash of the recent
decade. Yes, I understand what he was doing, conflating high and low culture,
sure, but it now seems heavy-handed. But, even then, there were terrific
moments like, (Untitled) Joan Crawford Says
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>. (1964). And
spaghetti, which Jim always did great things with. He made a Faustian pact with greatness, and had setbacks and
fallow periods, triumphs and pitfalls in his private hell.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> I glimpsed some of these when I was an
apprentice to the sorcerer.
My
job working for James Rosenquist came to an end soon enough. I wasn’t a very
good worker. And maybe I asked too many questions. But I have always loved the
man and his work. It was one of the great experiences of my life to sit with
him and sip Jack Daniels, or was it Jim Beam, yeah, probably Jim Beam, from tin
cups after a day of hard labor.
Perhaps
some day I will get down to Florida and spend some time with Rosenquist,
sipping whiskey from a tin cup again. I have so many more questions today. But
I am not sure that I would get more answers. Oh well.
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