James Rosenquist: The Ad Man Who Hijacked Fine Art (and Thank God He Did)

If you’ve ever looked at a James Rosenquist painting and thought, “Is that a spaghetti? On a windshield? Next to...a baby?”—congratulations. You’ve had the correct reaction. Rosenquist wanted your eyeballs to trip over each other. He wanted you to stop and say, “Wait, what am I looking at?” And then—if he was really doing his job—you’d start to see the seams of the modern world splitting open in full technicolor.

Let’s get this out of the way: yes, Rosenquist is often lumped in with the Pop artists. But calling him a Pop artist is like calling a scalpel a butter knife. Sure, he used images from advertising. Sure, he painted on a billboard-sized scale. But Rosenquist wasn’t celebrating consumer culture—he was dissecting it. If Warhol was the cool, deadpan observer and Lichtenstein was the comic book guy with a flair for irony, Rosenquist was the one backstage, ripping apart the set and spray-painting it back together with a smirk and a little rage.

His early career painting billboards in Times Square did more than pay the rent. It completely rewired how he approached a canvas. Think about it—he was perched on scaffolding for hours, up close to giant faces, fragments of products, lips the size of his torso. So when he turned to fine art, it’s no surprise that he brought that same scale and attitude with him. His paintings are big. Physically, yes—but also mentally. They take up space like they’ve been waiting to call you out.

Rosenquist's imagery is chopped up, mashed together, and reassembled in ways that make your brain work a little harder than it wants to. He’d splice together a woman’s face, a hunk of raw meat, and a lightbulb—and somehow it wouldn’t feel surreal. It would feel accurate. Like this was the world as we actually experience it: in fragments, in advertisements, in desires we can’t trace. He painted capitalism as a fever dream, and it hit a little too close to home.

Take his 1965 painting F-111—which is, frankly, a full-on masterpiece and also a middle finger to military-industrial bullshit. It’s forty-four panels, over 80 feet long, and includes images of a nuclear mushroom cloud, a child in a hair dryer, spaghetti, a tire, a jet, and a lightbulb. It’s overwhelming. That’s the point. It’s an aesthetic panic attack that quietly suggests: “Maybe the systems you trust are not just flawed, but actively insane.” (BTW, this piece is a MoMA if you want to go see it.)

And yet—here’s the twist—his work is also beautiful. That’s part of the trap. The surfaces are glossy, the edges are sharp, the colors are seductively saturated. Rosenquist lures you in with polish and then slaps you with subtext. You’re looking at a hyperreal lipstick smear and suddenly you’re thinking about death, politics, and the economy.

Visually, his style is collage by way of airbrush. His compositions aren engineered to jar you. He breaks the frame, he wraps the image around the viewer, and he blows up the most banal objects until they become borderline grotesque—or weirdly sacred. He makes you see the world the way a camera does: in close-ups, in jump cuts, in color that isn’t quite real.

Rosenquist also knew when to pull back. In his later work, you start to see a loosening—a kind of return to paint-for-paint’s-sake. But even then, the undercurrent is there: he’s still pulling from the overload of visual culture, still messing with scale and speed, still making you wonder what’s being sold and to whom. The sharpness remains, even when the imagery turns more abstract. He never got soft. He just got sly.

It’s also worth noting that Rosenquist never really played the “art star” game the way some of his peers did. He kept a little distance. He was wry, cerebral, Midwestern. His interviews are full of dry understatements that belie how sharp his work actually is. He seemed more interested in the ideas than the acclaim. Which, frankly, makes me like him more.

So why does James Rosenquist still matter? Because we are more saturated in images now than ever. Because the line between advertising and identity has gotten so blurry we’re all walking around like brand extensions. Because his work saw this coming, and rather than preaching about it, he showed us—with hot dogs, hairspray, and fighter jets.