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Pop art
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Pop art was pioneered in London in the mid-1950s by Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi (members of the Independent Group), and in the 1960s by Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Allen Jones, and Peter Phillips.
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James Rosenquist,
The Swimmer in the Econo-mist (painting 3),
1997– 1998.
Oil on canvas, 158 x 240 3/16 inches.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
Commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG in consultation with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.
2005.77.
© James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York.
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When James Rosenquist quit his job painting billboards in New York City in 1960, he imported many commercial techniques of the sign-painting trade into his work. Like his contemporaries Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol, Rosenquist went against the tide of Abstract Expressionism [more] and was labeled a New Realist. He developed his own brand of New Realism—later to be coined Pop art—by fragmenting and recombining images drawn from advertising, using commercial paint, and continuing to work on a large scale. Rosenquist was already one of the leaders of the American Pop art [more] movement when he achieved international acclaim in 1965 with his monumental painting F-111 (1964–65). Measuring 86 feet in length, this work commented on the military industrial complex that supported America’s burgeoning consumer culture and was considered by many to be an anti-war statement.
In 1970, Rosenquist painted Flamingo Capsule, which commemorates the American space program and is dedicated to the three astronauts who died in a 1967 flash-fire during a training session for the flight of Apollo I. The composition suggests fire in a contained space, and documents the artist’s idea of “objects floating around in the capsule.” Set against a field of red and yellow are the crumpled foil of a uniform emblazoned with the American flag, a twisted and distorted food bag, and the arc of a balloon floating through space.
Rosenquist continues to produce large-scale works, including the recent three-painting suite The Swimmer in the Econo-mist commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin. The paintings offer a dynamic vortex of imagery, from swirling color and consumer products, to quotations from F-111 as well as Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937). The commission commemorates the cooperative endeavor in Berlin between the Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and refers specifically to a unified Germany, to industry, and to the thriving global economy in the post-Cold War era. According to Rosenquist, “There’s an old Venetian saying, ‘The artist swims in the water, the critic stands ashore.’ So the swimmer is the active party. And the economy is a dream. It [the painting] describes being immersed in a tumult.”
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