| Maker(s): | Rosenquist, James Albert
| | Culture: | American (1933 - 2017)
| | Title: | High Pool
| | Date Made: | 1964-1966
| | Type: | Print
| | Materials: | Multicolor lithograph from 5 stones printed on Italia handmade paper
| | Place Made: | United States
| | Measurements: | sheet: 26 3/8 in x 40 1/4 in; 67 cm x 102.2 cm
| | Narrative Inscription: | title, edition, signature and date in pencil along bottom: high - pool 9/25 James Rosenquist 1964 - 66
| | Accession Number: | SC 2012.1.18
| | Credit Line: | Gift of The Pokross Art Collection, donated in accordance with the wishes of Muriel Kohn Pokross, class of 1934 by her children, Joan Pokross Curhan, class of 1959, William R. Pokross and David R. Pokross Jr. in loving memory of their parents, Muriel Kohn Pokross, class of 1934 and David R. Pokross
| | Museum Collection: | Smith College Museum of Art
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Not on view |
Label Text:
Born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, James Rosenquist spent his childhood in Minnesota and Ohio before moving to New York in 1955 to pursue a career as an artist. Although he received a traditional training in the 1950s at the University of Minnesota and the Arts Student League in New York, his experience as a billboard painter was a more prominent influence on his artistic development. Rosenquist’s most famous works appropriate the monumental scale, consumer culture imagery, and techniques of billboard painting. He takes recognizable visual ephemera, such as spaghetti, cars, or company logos and abstracts them through distortions of scale and compositional layering. Despite his classification as a Pop artist, which he denounces as “a handy term that has nothing to do with the art,” Rosenquist is interested in abstraction and challenging modes of perception, both of which can be explicitly seen in his prints.
High Pool, one of Rosenquist’s earliest prints, is a deviation from his repertoire of mass culture-inspired paintings and prints of the 1960s. Developed from a painting of two tondos, High Pool is the predecessor of a series of geometrically abstract lithographs which Rosenquist produced in the 1970s. In his prints, Rosenquist challenges our perception of abstract forms through deceptively descriptive titles. While the title, High Pool, may evoke aquatic associations, the ethereal blue forms are also reminiscent of celestial bodies. Rosenquist’s word-image play challenges the viewer by proposing ambiguous meaning which we may choose to accept or ignore.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+2012.1.18 |
