James Rosenquist

One of the luminaries of Pop art, James Rosenquist came to painting from commercial art: in the late 1950s he worked as a billboard painter in Times Square and other locations around New York. By 1960 he had committed himself to fine art, imparting the heroic scale, stylized forms, and electric hues of his trade to painting.

Rosenquist’s iconic works, themselves frequently billboard size, often begin as preparatory collages of reproductions from magazines. Alterations in the shift from mass-media source to oil on canvas might include jarring changes in size and scale and the addition of high-key color, rendering Rosenquist’s prosaic subjects—which coalesce, like those of his Pop contemporaries, around domestic, consumerist, and technological themes—strange and startling. The artist’s juxtaposition of disparate images across multiple panels intensifies this effect of defamiliarization, placing a burden on the viewer to distill sense and meaning from the disjunctive pictorial syntax.

In U-Haul-It, Rosenquist conjoins a panel picturing a pocket watch and a pat of butter melting in a frying pan with another depicting a series of car chassis at a factory and a third showing part of the U-Haul logo as it might appear on the side of a moving van. A range of painterly styles—from exacting illusionism to near abstraction—and the use of three different panel sizes accentuates the jumble of images. Rosenquist’s cheerful palette may mask critical implications—a suggested continuum between cozy domesticity and mass production, for example, or the abstracting of corporate logo into gleaming reflection—to say nothing of the note of urgency added by the watch.