There are pure painters and there are American painters, and James Rosenquist, a survey of whose work since 1961 fills a floor of New York City's Whitney Museum this summer, is decidedly one of the latter. What other artist in the past 25 years has scanned the American scene more faithfully or brought such a compelling if fractured narrative out of its weird slippages and layerings of imagery? In the heyday of pop art, there was more stress on Rosenquist's means and less on his ends. One saw the devices from advertising, the billboard manner; one felt affronted by its "vulgarity"...
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