James Rosenquist

This is the catalogue the Whitney Museum of American Art published for its 1972 survey of James Rosenquist, held April 12 through May 29. The text is by curator Marcia Tucker; the catalogue of the prints is by Elke M. Solomon.

The exhibition came roughly a decade into Rosenquist's career. It traced his move from commercial billboard painting into large-scale collaged canvases that fragment and rescale consumer imagery. Tucker's essay reads the paintings against Pop art's engagement with mass media and advertising. Solomon's checklist catalogues the prints, already a significant part of Rosenquist's output by the early 1970s.

James Rosenquist trained as a commercial sign painter before turning to fine art in New York in the late 1950s. He became one of the defining figures of American Pop art, known for canvases that juxtapose fragments of advertising imagery at mural scale. Coming this early in his career, the Whitney catalogue remains a primary document of his first decade of work.