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[[image]] James Rosenquist, Four 1949 Guys, o/c, 60" x 48", 1959. [[image]] James Rosenquist, Tube, o/c, 58" diameter, 1961. which the spectator can occupy the equivalent of the artist's original viewpoint. There is, in fact, a dissolution of vantage point so that the spectator is put into a kind of nowhere by the scale of the array. In total, these environmental paintings propose an epic treatment of American subjects and, at the same time, there is a postponed closure of the relationships and a derealization of the objects themselves. By derealization I mean the obverse of the "making or being real of something imagined" (Random House unabridged). It is something that Rosenquist could not do in painting if he did not have common ground with his spectator in the form of pre-known objects and recognizable types of signs supplied by the mass media. By using known sources, Rosenquist is able to make us aware of the degree of abstraction or transformation that they are undergoing. Hence his ability to give us a familiar world and to withdraw it from us. He depicts the world in terms of those episodes in which we lose our grip on it. His use of the mass media as a legible sign inventory existing prior to the painting is obviously held in common with other Pop artists. On the other hand, no other Pop artist used this fund of imagery and technique the way Rosenquist has, celebrating America and alienation from it. His is a unique moralism, articulate but secretive. Between 1952 and 1960, Rosenquist painted outdoor commercial jobs, starting with "storage bins, grain elevators, and gasoline tanks throughout Iowa, Wisconsin, and North Dakota," to quote Linda Cathcart's chronology in the catalogue. From 1957 he painted billboards in New York City and, at the same time, evolved his own painting to a free brushy style represented at the museum by Astor and Mayfair, both of 1958. Zone, 1960, is said to be his "first painting which employs commercial techniques" (Cathcart again), though according to Lucy Lippard, much repainted in its present form. 10 However, the dating of works in the present show suggests a less abrupt change to the real thing in Rosenquist's art. In 1959, for instance, he painted Four 1949 Guys, which is characteristic of his mature work inasmuch as the four sections contain a clearly rendered ice cream cone and incomplete images of men. Recognizable poses are indicated but the identity of the actors is blocked. This mix of concreteness and evasiveness is fully characteristic of his art. It is one of a group of paintings done between 1959 and 1961, which are solemn in color, darkly shadowed, and somewhat labored in paint-handling.11 It is as if Rosenquist were working for a closed, dense paint deposit in opposition to the open and fluid surface of billboard painting which, though legible at a distance, is porous close-up. At an opposite extreme is President Elect, 1960-61, which is the closest of all his paintings to a regular billboard, in its open touch and public face. It is a clear, trite American triptych: hero's head, hands demonstrating a cake's texture, and part of an auto. In successive paintings Rosenquist abandoned the heavy surface and concentrated on reconciling the formal properties of the billboard and easel painting. The Lines Were Etched Deeply on her Face, 1961, reveals the successful intersection of personally generated images and a technique derived from commercial art. The collision of the objects is sharper than later on, but a principle of intercepted images and suspended explication has been established. Tube, 1961, is an extraordinary painting, a tondo painted as if it were a rearview mirror or a comparable reflecting surface. A section of an automobile appears at the center of the image which otherwise consists of unidentifiable reflections (an anticipation of Lichtenstein's mirror paintings of 1970). Rosenquist has brought into painting, from his billboard expertise, a range of hitherto unpainted textures, such as curved reflective surfaces, expanses of crumpled metal, and amorphous fields of flesh or drapery. It is not an image of the process of perception but it does create a situation in which we are reminded of perceptual crises and double takes in our own lives. Tube is not explainable as the reconstruction of an objective single event, as it is not iconic in correspondence to a possible situation. However both the inserted image of the car and the reflections are compatible stylistically, as parts of an easy-ranging eloquence of flowing brushwork. Rosenquist has taken the strangely immersive experience of painting enormous forms close-up and found a way to transfer them to moderate-sized canvases. Who painted reflections five feet across before Rosenquist? To quote Marcia Tucker, Rosenquist switches "the accepted values of objects and field,"12 so that sky can become a solid patch and an object seen near at hand can dilate to field status. Thus the derealization of Rosenquist's objects, recognized but doubted in their substantiality or wholeness, is the result of a coincidence of the formal resources of commercial art and the demands of an authentic personal imagination. Lucy Lippard suggested of Capillary Action 1, 1962, that the "photographic grays and 'natural' tones are played against each other to expose the artificiality and banality of nature. A grisaille foreground implies 'Please Don't Step on the Grass', a Kelly-green panel stuck over a swatch of paint-smeared newspaper and tape implies 'Wet Paint'. Rosenquist says it is about 'seeing abstraction everywhere, looking at a landscape and seeing abstraction.'"13 Tucker, discussing the same picture, notes: "color reverses the illusion of distance... because the foreground is gray and the background green; this is the opposite of the way grayed-out color is traditionally used to indicate distance and brightened tones are used to suggest nearness."14 Lippard's nature and art polarity and Tucker's foreground and background exchange both suggest the complexity of Rosenquist's pictures which are frequently hard to read. The fact is that in all of his work
