Painting Below Zero Notes on a Life in Art

by Rosenquist, James; Dalton, David

• ISBN13: 9780307263421
• ISBN10: 0307263428
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-10-27
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

Part of the 1960s Pop Art movement along with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Rosenquist's dramatic, surreally juxtaposed images revolutionized 20th-century painting. His candid memoir offers a unique look inside the contemporary art world.

Author Biography

James Rosenquist has had more than fifteen retrospectives, with two at the Whitney Museum of American Art and four at the Guggenheim Museum. He also has had one in Moscow, two in Spain, and one at the Smithsonian in Washington, in addition to many gallery and museum exhibitions, both in the United States and abroad. He divides his time between Florida and New York, where he lives with his wife and daughter.

Excerpts

F O U R

Zone

B E G I N N I N G S O F P A I N T I N G I D E A S

When I think of it now, there were parts of my life that were very strange, particularly those periods when I didn't know what to do. The time I thought of raising cattle in California, the year I worked as a chauffeur and a bartender for the Stearnses, the last few years of working on billboards. At the Stearnses' I had that octagonal studio upstairs, but I didn't know what to do when I got there. Whenever I come to a mental standstill now, I go back to those periods.

I've done a lot of paintings in my life but there were times when I was utterly at a loss for what to do next. When I look back I'm incredulous; I get mad at these former selves of mine and ask, "What was the matter with you? You didn't know what to do? Could you have started painting in, say, 1956?" The thing is, I lacked the abstract turn of mind necessary to transform the raw materials into art. Also, I guess I was too interested in trying to do well at whatever I was doing at the time.

By the late 1950s I'd begun to lead a double life. In the daytime I painted billboards and designed display windows for Bonwit Teller, Tiffany, and Bloomingdale's; at night and on the weekends I hung out with artists and painted. At first, I painted small abstractions. I idolized the great abstract expressionists and jazz musicians. They were my heroes, they were mythic people, and by the mid- 1950s American art was in full bloom. Abstract expressionism had made New York the art center of the world, and this transformation had all happened in ten years. Just think: Pollock's career was from
1944 to 1956.

I had a lot of copies ofLifemagazine from the 1930s and early 1940s with articles about American and European painters in them.
The prevailing taste even among art critics was very conservative. We were so far away from "getting" modern art back then that at the 1937 Pittsburgh International Fair, Leon Kroll, a conventional, figurative painter, won first prize. Pierre Bonnard, painter of sublime, humid colors and jewel-like tiles, came in second! That always gives me an uplifting feeling whenever I think of it. One's contemporaries generally have it all wrong. That was the state of American art before it found its native soul. Europe had gone through fauvism, futurism, Dada, surrealism, Wassily Kandinsky, andLes Demoiselles d'Avignon, but as far as art went, you'd have thought Americans were still sleepwalking through the nineteenth century.

I met Leon Kroll once. His paintings were traditional— nicely done portraits and figures. That kind of art won prizes up until the
beginning of the 1940s. There was a big transition from 1939 to 1946. During the war European artists had come here— Max Ernst,
Roberto Matta, George Grosz, Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky—and with them came the transmission of new art from Europe to
America. The idea of what art was shifted radically. You could see a new sophistication coming in— the energy of the picture plane. Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Mark Rothko . . . It was as if the American spirit had revealed itself at last as a kind of howl in paint.

I came to New York to study art, and to meet artists. And where do you find artists? In bars, especially in the 1950s. Drinks were cheap in those days. White Rose bar whiskey was twenty-five cents a shot; if you had $3 you could get twelve shots— that would do it. Among the artists' bars was the old Cedar Tavern on University Place and Eighth Street, not to be confused with the Cedar Bar, which was also on University Place and came later.

The Cedar Tavern had been a workingman's bar and therefore cheap. It was just a long, narrow space with a room in the back. It
was where Pollock had kicked the bathroom door off its hinges and they left it that way. The fluorescent lights looked green. They had Audubon and horse prints on

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Excerpted from Painting below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art by David Dalton, James Rosenquist
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