Tube

James Rosenquist, who has been called "one of the brashest and most gifted innovators of American Pop Art," used his training as a billboard painter to create arresting works with immediate impact (Peter Schejeldahl, "An Interview with James Rosenquist," Opus International, December 1971, quoted in James Rosenquist, exh. cat., Valencia, 1991, p. 204). In his highly-inventive mature paintings, the artist constructs compositions with fragments from commercial images and his own photographs, arranging disparate elements into a sometimes cacophonous painted collages. With a slick style derived from advertising techniques, Rosenquist renders surfaces with astonishing clarity and achieves an effect that is seemingly related in character and content to the fast-paced, consumer-oriented culture that epitomized American society in the early 1960s.

Rosenquist has asserted that his images play on the viewer's perception of time, as is especially evident in the present painting. The shaped canvas is exceptional in Rosenquist's oeuvre, and its form, together with the swirls of black paint which trail its edges, create the impression of a chrome hubcap in motion, an implied rotation that contrasts sharply with the fragment of a stationary car at center. This image implies both speed and stasis. As the artist has acknowledged, "I'm interested in contemporary vision-the flick of chrome, rapid associations, quick flashes of light. Bing-bang! Bing-bang! I don't do anecdotes, I accumulate experiences (J. Rosenquist, "Art: Pop: Big Bang Landscapes," Time, May 1965, p. 80).