PATTI Armanini

In an interview, artist James Rosenquist freely offers his views on a wide array of topics—from collectors, curators, and artists he has known to U.S. politics and how he came to live in Florida. Of the generation credited with the invention of pop art—one that includes Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Robert Indiana—Rosenquist at age seventy-two remains a fountainhead of new visions and ideas. After gaining fame in the 1960s with such now-classic works as F-111, President-Elect, and I Love You with My Ford, Rosenquist suffered a number of setbacks in the 1970s. With minimalism and conceptual art ruling supreme, his billboard-derived version of pop art was dismissed as uncool and overly reliant on commercial and political messages. But in the 1980s painting returned with a vengeance, and the onetime herald of pop was in fashion again. Indeed, over the last forty years Rosenquist has taken the welter of visual information spewed out by the media, in all its fragmented, incongruent, and mind-boggling glory, and transformed it into iconic representations of modern life. In what has been called the ”American Century,” Rosenquist’s paintings embody the vaunted ”soft power” our country came to exert in the world’s cultural arena.