Installation view of James Rosenquist’s F-111 (1964-65) at The Museum of Modern Art, 2012. Oil on canvas with aluminum, 23 sections. 10 x 86′ (304.8 x 2621.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (both by exchange). © 2012 James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photo by Jonathan Muzikar.
James Rosenquist. F-111 (detail). 1964-65. Oil on canvas with aluminum, 23 sections. 10 x 86′ (304.8 x 2621.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (both by exchange). © 2012 James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York.
James Rosenquist. F-111 (detail). 1964-65. Oil on canvas with aluminum, 23 sections. 10 x 86? (304.8 x 2621.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (both by exchange). © 2012 James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York.
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Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
212-708-9400
New York
The Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Gallery,
fourth floor
James Rosenquist: F-111
January 25, 2012-July 30, 2012
James Rosenquist began to paint the 84-foot-long F-111 in 1964, in the middle of one of this country’s most turbulent decades. Inspired by advertising billboards and by earlier mural-scaled paintings, such as Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, he designed its 23 panels to wrap around the four walls of the Leo Castelli Gallery at 4 East 77th Street, where it would be displayed the following year. Rosenquist took as his subject the F-111 fighter bomber plane, the newest, most technologically advanced weapon at the time, and positioned it, as he later explained, “flying through the flak of consumer society to question the collusion between the Vietnam death machine, consumerism, the media, and advertising.” Its jumps of scale, collage-like juxtaposition of fragments of imagery, and gloriously vivid palette exemplify the style that defines Rosenquist’s singular contribution to Pop art in the United States. For this special installation, located outside the entrance to the fourth-floor Painting and Sculpture galleries, F-111 is presented as it was first exhibited at the Castelli Gallery in 1965.
Rosenquist designed the 86-foot-long F-111 to wrap around the four walls of the Leo Castelli Gallery, at 4 East Seventy-Seventh Street in Manhattan. He began the painting in 1964, in the middle of a turbulent decade marked by the escalating Vietnam War. Funded by citizens’ tax dollars, the F-111 fighter-bomber plane was being developed as the USA’s newest, most technologically advanced weapon. Rather than celebrate its military might, Rosenquist used the plane as a symbol of the economic implications of war. As it flies “through the flak of consumer society,” he later explained, the jet’s sharply pointed fuselage pierces superimposed images of commercial products and references to war, such as the bullet-shaped hair dryer floating above a young girl’s head and the atomic mushroom cloud frozen behind a beach umbrella.
F-111 is presented here as it was first exhibited at the Castelli Gallery in 1965, now also alongside a group of collages the artist made in preparation for this monumental composition. Rosenquist was well acquainted with painting on this immense scale: before becoming an artist he had earned a living as a billboard painter in New York City. Interested in the phenomenon of peripheral vision, Rosenquist wanted the painting to create an immersive environment that would heighten the viewer’s awareness of his or her own position in space. He cited artistic precedents for this ambition in works such as Claude Monet’s Water Lilies and the large horizontal paintings by Abstract Expressionist artists Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman.
James Rosenquist. F-111 (detail). 1964-65. Oil on canvas with aluminum, 23 sections. 10 x 86? (304.8 x 2621.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (both by exchange). © 2012 James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York
James Rosenquist. F-111 (detail). 1964-65. Oil on canvas with aluminum, 23 sections. 10 x 86′ (304.8 x 2621.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (both by exchange). © 2012 James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York |
