Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art
by James Rosenquist, David Dalton
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Book Summary Information
Author: David Dalton, James RosenquistEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-10-27
ISBN: 0307263428
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art
Book Review: James Rosenquist Explains his Art in his Own Words
Summary: 5 Stars
Just like one of his paintings, the artist James Rosenquist has painted a picture of modern art that brings clarity to a field that is frequently misunderstood.
Rosenquist's book, Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art, defends a discipline that many view as a hellacious place where ordinary men and women feel uncomfortable, at best, and confused at worst. Some people just get mad at contemporary art -- schools of art that they consider a waste of time.
But Rosenquist does a pretty good job at explaining what his art means, and what many contemporary artists are trying to achieve (even if they never quite achieve their goals). In effect, Rosenquist opens a window on the world of modern art that always seems to be one (or two, or three) steps ahead of the normal world.
As a young man from North Dakota and Minnesota, Rosenquist painted billboards that advertised an array of ordinary goods, from detergents and whiskey, to automobiles and Hollywood movies.
But even as a young man, Rosenquist had loftier ambitions, and in 1955 he moved to New York. He got a job painting billboards and became quite adept at his trade, sitting hundreds of feet above Times Square to paint massive billboards that extolled the virtues of the good life in the 1950's. As he worked he dreamed about transferring his trade into a more cerebral aesthetic, and he took some courses at the Art Students League.
He found a cheap studio and started to create his own art in his spare time. He met other artists in bars like the Cedar Tavern where he encountered Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. In time, his work was recognized and he ended up as one of the founders of the so-called Pop Art field where artists celebrated ordinary American life in the middle of the 20th century. But Rosenquist went further in his paintings: he was smart enough to create works of art that provoked his viewers to reflect on and examine their own cherished memories.
"I wasn't, despite what people may have thought, glorifying popular imagery; I was attempting to deconstruct it, to dismantle it, and convert it in an aesthetic of my own....I have to admit I am somewhat poetically involved in these images...In my paintings I only hope to create a colorful shoehorn for someone who sees it, to make that person reflect on his or her own feelings."
Pop artists, according to Rosenquist "were products of the booming 1950's." By his own account, Rosenquist took fragments of popular images and pieced them together to make the viewer examine the gist of contemporary culture. "By leaving the meaning up in the air I could provoke responses in the viewer that would trigger further questioning. What are these things I'm looking at and what do they mean? Each person seeing the painting will come away with a different idea."
Rosenquist's book (written with the biographer David Dalton) provides one of the best explanations of the group of artists who moved our culture from the aura of the abstract expressionists to even newer schools of arts such as op-art, minimalism, conceptualism and post-modernism.
One of America's leading literary reviews said Rosenquist's book is "short on introspection," which is a lapse in critical judgment if there ever was one. Rosenquist in fact analyzes his own art and his reasons for painting as he does at length, and having read this book, the reader comes away with an even greater appreciation for his work.
"When I started out, there wasn't any market for my paintings, and so I wasn't painting to fulfill anybody's expectations but my own, and I still don't," he writes. "Art comes out of intuition. An artist has an idea, an image - even a nightmare - and the only way he can get it out of his system is to make art."
The book is full of anecdotes about the world of modern art, including his contemporaries (Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg) dealers (Leo Castelli, Richard Feigen, among others), and the big institutional collectors who can afford to buy his biggest and his best work. Some of the anecdotes are hilarious, such as the time he is interviewed by a group of Florida government officials who are considering his work for a public installation.
"These were the good old boys - straight out of Li'l Abner," Rosenquist writes. And then one of them starts talking about Cezanne. "These pork-chopper in Tallahassee weren't exactly as ignorant as I thought," he concedes.
The book is also well illustrated with Rosenquist's principal works of art, including his epic 86-foot long painting, F111, which is a four-section fold out. Black and white illustrations of his work are also included in the text. One wishes they were in color as well.
Summary of Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art
From James Rosenquist, one of our most iconic pop artists?along with Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein?comes this candid and fascinating memoir. Unlike these artists, Rosenquist often works in three-dimensional forms, with highly dramatic shifts in scale and a far more complex palette, including grisaille and Day-Glo colors. A skilled traditional painter, he avoided the stencils and silk screens of Warhol and Lichtenstein. His vast canvases full of brilliant, surreally juxtaposed images would influence both many of his contemporaries and younger generations, as well as revolutionize twentieth-century painting.Ronsequist writes about growing up in a tight-knit community of Scandinavian farmers in North Dakota and Minnesota in the late 1930s and early 1940s; about his mother, who was not only an amateur painter but, along with his father, a passionate aviator; and about leaving that flat midwestern landscape in 1955 for New York, where he had won a scholarship to the Art Students League. George Grosz, Edwin Dickinson, and Robert Beverly Hale were among his teachers, but his early life was a struggle until he discovered sign painting. He describes days suspended on scaffolding high over Broadway, painting movie or theater billboards, and nights at the Cedar Tavern with Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and the poet LeRoi Jones. His first major studio, on Coenties Slip, was in the thick of the new art world. Among his neighbors were Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, and Jack Youngerman, and his mentors Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
Rosenquist writes about his shows with the dealers Richard Bellamy, Ileana Sonnabend, and Leo Castelli, and about colorful collectors like Robert and Ethel Scull. We learn about the 1971 car crash that left his wife and son in a coma and his own life and work in shambles, his lobbying?along with Rauschenberg?for artists? rights in Washington D.C., and how he got his work back on track.
With his distinct voice, Roseqnuist writes about the ideas behind some of his major paintings, from the startling revelation that led to his first pop painting, Zone, to his masterpiece, F-III, a stunning critique of war and consumerism, to the cosmic reverie of Star Thief.
This is James Rosenquist?s story in his own words?captivating and unexpected, a unique look inside the contemporary art world in the company of one of its most important painters.
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