James Rosenquist/F 111

Click on the arrow to view/from you tube

There has been such high interest in the James Rosenquist article that I wrote earlier I thought I would add some additional information for those of you who are interested in the artist and the man. This is a you tube clip about the F 111 fighter plane that he painted.  I enjoyed listening to it myself...thought I had seen the painting before I had never listened to a thorough explanation of its meaning. It is quite interesting.  I love researching these articles I learn so much along the way to share with you.  It is an exceedingly large paining made up of many canvases,  84 feet long.  Only certain museums can show the piece because it is so large.  Here is an except from the MOMA article on its showing. 


 "James Rosenquist began to paint the 86-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 in Manhattan, 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 in development 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"