Customer Reviews

Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art

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In years ahead, James Rosenquist may be better remembered for this book than for his paintings. It is a great autobiography that allows the reader rare entry to the workings of the creative mind.

Written as if you were personally listening to this Pop artist stream together tales and suggestions concerning his personal life--starting out in North Dakota with extended stays in New York City and Florida--, players in the American art scene from the 1950s on, and the inspirations for his own works of art, including F-111.

If you enjoy art, buy and read this book.

Just like one of his paintings, the artist James Rosenquist has painted a picture of modern art that brings clarity to a field that is frequently misunderstood.

Rosenquist's book, Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art, defends a discipline that many view as a hellacious place where ordinary men and women feel uncomfortable, at best, and confused at worst. Some people just get mad at contemporary art -- schools of art that they consider a waste of time.

But Rosenquist does a pretty good job at explaining what his art means, and what many contemporary artists are trying to achieve (even if they never quite achieve their goals). In effect, Rosenquist opens a window on the world of modern art that always seems to be one (or two, or three) steps ahead of the normal world.

As a young man from North Dakota and Minnesota, Rosenquist painted billboards that advertised an array of ordinary goods, from detergents and whiskey, to automobiles and Hollywood movies.

But even as a young man, Rosenquist had loftier ambitions, and in 1955 he moved to New York. He got a job painting billboards and became quite adept at his trade, sitting hundreds of feet above Times Square to paint massive billboards that extolled the virtues of the good life in the 1950's. As he worked he dreamed about transferring his trade into a more cerebral aesthetic, and he took some courses at the Art Students League.

He found a cheap studio and started to create his own art in his spare time. He met other artists in bars like the Cedar Tavern where he encountered Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. In time, his work was recognized and he ended up as one of the founders of the so-called Pop Art field where artists celebrated ordinary American life in the middle of the 20th century. But Rosenquist went further in his paintings: he was smart enough to create works of art that provoked his viewers to reflect on and examine their own cherished memories.

"I wasn't, despite what people may have thought, glorifying popular imagery; I was attempting to deconstruct it, to dismantle it, and convert it in an aesthetic of my own....I have to admit I am somewhat poetically involved in these images...In my paintings I only hope to create a colorful shoehorn for someone who sees it, to make that person reflect on his or her own feelings."

Pop artists, according to Rosenquist "were products of the booming 1950's." By his own account, Rosenquist took fragments of popular images and pieced them together to make the viewer examine the gist of contemporary culture. "By leaving the meaning up in the air I could provoke responses in the viewer that would trigger further questioning. What are these things I'm looking at and what do they mean? Each person seeing the painting will come away with a different idea."

Rosenquist's book (written with the biographer David Dalton) provides one of the best explanations of the group of artists who moved our culture from the aura of the abstract expressionists to even newer schools of arts such as op-art, minimalism, conceptualism and post-modernism.

One of America's leading literary reviews said Rosenquist's book is "short on introspection," which is a lapse in critical judgment if there ever was one. Rosenquist in fact analyzes his own art and his reasons for painting as he does at length, and having read this book, the reader comes away with an even greater appreciation for his work.

"When I started out, there wasn't any market for my paintings, and so I wasn't painting to fulfill anybody's expectations but my own, and I still don't," he writes. "Art comes out of intuition. An artist has an idea, an image - even a nightmare - and the only way he can get it out of his system is to make art."

The book is full of anecdotes about the world of modern art, including his contemporaries (Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg) dealers (Leo Castelli, Richard Feigen, among others), and the big institutional collectors who can afford to buy his biggest and his best work. Some of the anecdotes are hilarious, such as the time he is interviewed by a group of Florida government officials who are considering his work for a public installation.

"These were the good old boys - straight out of Li'l Abner," Rosenquist writes. And then one of them starts talking about Cezanne. "These pork-chopper in Tallahassee weren't exactly as ignorant as I thought," he concedes.

The book is also well illustrated with Rosenquist's principal works of art, including his epic 86-foot long painting, F111, which is a four-section fold out. Black and white illustrations of his work are also included in the text. One wishes they were in color as well.

This autobiography of one of the major actors of Pop Art in the U.S. is a must-read for anyone interested in post-war American art. Apart from giving invaluable insight into the NY art world of the last four decades, it is an honest and down-to-earth account of a major artist's life, an artist who came from a grass-root middle-class American family from North Dakota, went on to paint billboards in California and became a master of Pop Art in NYC along with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

Few artists are able to put down on paper what they achieve on canvas, and Rosenquist has managed to do just that. There are some brilliant moments in the book, especially when the artist explains the making and meaning of his paintings, and also some moving passages (the ones on his first dealer, Dick Bellamy, or on Joseph Cornell for instance). Very enjoyable and highly recommended reading.

In general I liked the book. If you're looking for much about his personal life you won't find it here, which is fine with me. He could have shortened the book by not going into explanations about so many of his paintings.

The beginning of the book was very interesting as he describes his struggles and difficult life as he subsists on very little. I did not finish the book which became rather boring as he describes his success as an artist. Sorry.
ruth Aizuss Migdal