
Rosenquist’s Rouge
ROY LICHTENSTEIN IS A Pop artist. Andy Warhol is a Pop artist. But James Rosenquist is not a Pop artist: he made no use of Jasper Johns’ “Flags.” The “Flags” offer lessons in how to contain Jackson Pollock’s fields of energy, how to turn their troubled sprawl into an affect-less spread of stylishness. That is what Warhol learned from Johns. I would say that Rosenquist learned directly from Pollock, but you don’t learn from Pollock. You confront him, which Rosenquist did and still does.
Confronting Pollock is a thankless task. Certainly no one has sufficiently praised the herculean finesse with