James Rosenquist, Pop Art Pioneer, Dies at 83 -
By KEN JOHNSONAPRIL 1, 2017
James Rosenquist, who helped define Pop Art in its 1960s heyday with his boldly
scaled painted montages of commercial imagery, died on Friday in New York City.
Besides the show at the Guggenheim in 2003, Mr. Rosenquist had museum retrospectives at the National Gallery of Canada
in Ottawa in 1968; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1972; and the Denver Art Museum in 1985.
That same year his work was included in a survey of new art at Sidney Janis Gallery called “International Exhibition of the New Realists”
that put what would soon come to be known as Pop Art on the map of contemporary consciousness.
“Was importing the method into art a bit of a cheap trick?” the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New Yorker in
2003 on the occasion of a ballyhooed retrospective of Mr. Rosenquist’s work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
A version of this article appears in print on April 2, 2017, on Page A24 of the New York edition
with the headline: James Rosenquist, Whose Paintings Helped Define Pop Art, Dies at 83.
William Acquavella, the New York art dealer, said that Mr. Rosenquist lost a significant amount of work in the fire.
In 1955, Mr. Rosenquist received a one-year scholarship to the Art Students League in New York, arriving with $350 in his pocket, he said.
