Volunteer

James Rosenquists Volunteer from 1963-64 is an oil painting from the period when the artist was establishing the signature style that would make him one of the leading figures of American Pop Art, combining fragments of commercial imagery on a monumental scale to create paintings that confront the viewer with the visual overload of American consumer culture. The title Volunteer may refer to the cultural and political expectations of volunteerism in American life, or it may be a fragment of text from an advertisement that Rosenquist has isolated and recontextualized, a practice he developed during his years as a billboard painter in New York when he became fluent in the visual language of commercial signage. The painting combines fragments of imagery drawn from advertising, product packaging, and other commercial sources with areas of abstract painting, creating a juxtaposition of the recognizable and the ambiguous that forces the viewer to construct meaning from visual clues that resist narrative resolution. The years 1963-64 place this work in the period when Rosenquist was producing his most iconic Pop paintings, including F-111 (1964-65), and Volunteer shares with that work the characteristic combination of monumental scale, commercial imagery, and painterly surfaces that distinguishes Rosenquists contribution to Pop Art from the more flat and mechanical approaches of his contemporaries. The oil on canvas medium allows Rosenquist to build up surfaces that reference the slick surfaces of commercial printing while maintaining the physical presence and gestural energy of action painting.

Rosenquists early Pop paintings are foundational works in the history of American art that demonstrated how commercial imagery could be transformed through scale, fragmentation, and painterly handling into a new kind of historical painting. Volunteer exemplifies the combination of commercial source material and abstract painting that defines his unique contribution to Pop Art.

An early Pop Art oil painting by Rosenquist combining fragments of commercial imagery with abstract painting on a monumental scale, demonstrating the visual overload and fragmentation of consumer culture that distinguishes his work from the more documentary Pop Art of his contemporaries.