James Rosenquist

Happy Birthday James Rosenquist!! Born in North Dakota in 1933, Pop Art painter Rosenquist’s family relocated to Minneapolis in 1942. He studied art at the University of Minnesota and went on to work in advertising, painting billboards and signs. As he emerged onto the Pop Art scene, he created scenes or stories on canvas with recognizable images overlapping and combined with seemingly unrelated items. Although he has been compared to Lichenstein and Warhol, the artists did not work in collaboration or even know each other as they “arrived” on the Pop Art scene. I am including his F-111 here, a large, long and narrow work displayed in The Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Painted during the Vietnam War, F-111 has obvious anti-military overtones. Rosenquist continues to work on large-scale commissions.