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Needs Review 28 no 21 Okt '76: 538 Rosenquist Mayor Gallery In the past several years, the Mayor Gallery has almost consistently concentrated on contemporary American art. For example, they have shown Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oppenheim, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg. In 1974, James Rosenquist had his first London one-man show at the Mayor, and now he is back with six works, one executed in 1975 and the remaining five in 1976. Now the Mayor space is small; indeed, compared to New York galleries, tiny. Their policy has been to show new work by the American artists they deal with; and a number of them must have worked with the Mayor show in mind. The works that result are hardly minute by ordinary standards; but James Rosenquist's best known painting, F-111 is after all 86 ft. long. Taken as a series the American shows that the Mayor has organised [[organized]] have been almost without exception of exceptional interest; and I can't help feeling that this is due to the quality of the artists' response to showing their work in such a comparatively restricted space. This is particularly revealing in the case of Rosenquist; and for this country must reveal new facets of his approach, as our experience has been in the main limited to Pop Art Redefined at the Hayward, and the Tate's Silo, and the prints published by Petersburg Press on the F-111. At its simplest, the term pop art is taken to refer to those artists who use popular imagery, culled from magazines, comics, photographs, television and advertising, i.e. 'the media', as source material for their paintings, prints and sculptures - and by extension, popular icons, for example, John's use of the American flag (the pervasive use of the Oath of Allegiance and the American flag at the start of the American state school day may not be fully appreciated or understood in England, not the quite startling sight, for a European in any event, of the American flag on display in thousands if not millions of suburban gardens, suburban shopping centres, and public buildings). Rosenquist is, of course, normally categorised [[categorized]] as a pop artist. He has indicated that he regards advertising as a kind of brainwashing. Many of his paintings, at times in mixed media, and with the use of three-dimensional projections attached to the picture surface, have used both images and techniques (especially the huge scale of the images, and cut-outs) culled from advertising, and especially, billboards. [[image: painting]] Above. Black Star by James Rosenquist at Mayor Gallery Rosenquist was born in 1933 in Grand Forks, North Dakota; later the family settled in Minneapolis, where as a teenager Rosenquist studied on Saturdays at the Minneapolis School of Art; later he was to study painting at the University of Minnesota, and finally at the Art Students League, New York. But while he was studying fine art he was also working as an industrial painter when still living in the Mid-west; painting such structures as gas tanks, storage bins, grain elevators. And billboards; and when he came to New York, he continued to paint billboards, including billboards in Times Square certainly painting on a huge scale! Yet for all his sources, he has insisted that 'the subject isn't popular images'. Disparate images are linked, abruptly or smoothly; it is the spaces in between, or the relationships, total and particular, that count. Fragments, and fragments out of scale; objects made like an assemblage and attached to the picture surface, or unaltered or hardly altered real objects; these are so to speak the elements of many of Rosenquist's pictures. The pictures at the Mayor consist in part of dribbles of brightly coloured paint; cut-outs and cut-ins (one has a spiral-circle cut-out in the picture, with behind a card with a protruding edge at the side of the frame so that one can twirl the card); paper in various forms, looking like the leaves of a book, or a section from a slightly crumpled brown paper bag. There are also leaves of paper stacked at slightly wriggly right angles one to the other, marching diagonally across the surface like a staircase; and various sectioned circles, like chocolate Dutch oranges (only in bright rainbow colours) those diagrams one sees in textbooks explain or make visual the proportions something that is divided up in differing ways and quantities. There is also writing in Midnight Sun part of a paper detergent packet is depicted, and in capital black letters on the typical box in two colours orange is written 'IN... DIRT'S OU[?] while a big silvery disc in the same painting bears this exhortation round its [?] please don't litter dispose of property. There is also a painted electric bulb. the painting Federal Spending there is again a circle cut into coloured segments, a b[?] of pretty colours and a pair of paper cut out spectacles painted in variegated rainbow coloured stripes. In Book Fans Wh[?] Paint Walks an attached construction paper looks like a book turned back on itself so that the pages fan out, while painted construction of paper like a star perambulates diagonally across the surface. These new paintings use a lot of pretty bright colours; and a good deal is made [?] spaces which are relatively free of inciden[?]. The colours have a free and easy air, though they had come out of a childrens paint box. They are even splashed about a bit. They retain the air of improvisation within a formal organisation that has infused Rosenquist's work before, but they have abandoned to a large extent the kind of social comment that whatever the artists intention was impossible not to read in many of his paintings, if only because the images used were both so common and so startling in their juxtapositions that our advertising dominated visual society [?] we have to react to them associatively. Although the forms in these new paintings are suggestive and indeed open to various interpretations, the initial impact is that intelligent and sensuous and organization [?] forms, beguiling variations in textures and depths, and joyous color; and the more sombre work on view has rare delicacy And this may be the lasting impact, too. Marine Vaiz Roger Nellens Marlborough Fine Arts The Pop artists drew their subject matter not from the functionless, lacking even the pseudo-reality of Paolozzi's psuedo-machines. No one could construct a working machine from their guidance. 'My machines,' Nellens says, 'are useless except as a is not a great art. But it is magnificent decoration. Harold Osbore David Tindle
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