James Rosenquist Interview (page: 4 / 8) Pop Art Master	Print Interview

How did your parents react to your interest in art? It's not a very practical career.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. James Rosenquist: When I was little, they always let me make as big a mess as I wanted to. And I loved that. And I would do all sorts of things, and another thing, too, they always encouraged me to take off and travel. And that was freedom, I felt free. I think I got my talent from my mother and my aunt Dolores. My father was very mechanical and used to invent things. He worked in the aircraft industry and he'd invent on a lot of little things. And so, there is something from there, maybe. You know, that situation. And then, my family background, my father's cousin, Albert Hedberg, who I was named after, was in the Army Air Corps, and he and my father were going to start an airline from North Dakota to Winnipeg, Canada, an international airline, then to deliver mail, and poor Albert crashed flying a Senator Schnitzler. He tried to make a forced landing in a farmer's field, and they had carved a big ditch in it, and they were both totally smashed up. So that sort of stopped my father's career at that point. So my family was interesting. And my grandfather, my father's father, they were interesting people. So that sort of gave me an urge to move, to do something.

You say your mother and your aunt were talented?

James Rosenquist: They painted. She could play the piano, she could paint. Yes.

Were there any books you remember that particularly inspired you, growing up?

James Rosenquist: Adventure stories. I was an only child, so when I was little I used to sneak away and go to the movies, and I saw some strange movies. It was in the '40s, so The Beast with Five Fingers, Lost Horizon. The real one, that first came out, I saw that. The little girl in that movie, the little Chinese girl who turned out to be 800 years old when they crossed the mountains -- later, at the National Endowment -- I sat next to her. That's Margot Albert, married to Eddie Albert. A tremendous woman. She's Mexican and she knew Frida Kahlo. She knew a lot of people.

You did some traveling on your own when you were very young, in the 1950s. Could you tell us about that?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. James Rosenquist: After going to California in 1951, I was sort of a motorcycle enthusiast at that time, and so I hitchhiked down to Florida to see the 200-mile motorcycle race at Daytona Beach, and then I continued south and I went to Key West. I got to Key West, and there was a travel agency on Duval Street, and I said, "How much to Cuba?" And they said you could fly there, 25 dollars, round trip on an old Army C-46! So I walked out on to the field in the morning, and there was nothing there. There were no buildings, there was no maintenance, it was a grassy strip in Key West. And I'm sitting there on this little suitcase I've got. I'm sitting there, and up walks the stewardess, sort of bedraggled. She comes up there (yawns) like this, and then another one. They had a crew of about ten on this plane, a little airplane, a twin engine like a DC-3. So then the captain comes, and everybody stand in line, and they salute. It's like very formal. The Aerolineas Venezolanas, I think it was, I don't know. So we get on the plane, and I arrive and stay right across from El Capitolio in Havana, which has the big diamond in the floor. Maybe it's a fake one now, I don't know. And I had this little balcony overlooking the capitol. I stayed about a week, and I met students who could go to school free if they could get there, but they didn't have enough money even to get on the bus to go there. Batista was around, and Fidel Castro was around in the back woods, and Batista was very bloody. He killed people left and right. In fact, the very room that I stayed in, one year later, there was some poor tourist from Philadelphia stayed there, and they shot 275 bullets in his room and killed him to pieces, and he was an innocent tourist. I saw the picture, and it was the very room I stayed in. So Cuba was beautiful. It was a very beautiful architecture, beautiful place. Lively. And now it's different.

One gets a stereotypical view of an artist's life, which is that it's a lonely pursuit, but you've enjoyed a life of adventure and travel. Is that possible for most artists?

James Rosenquist: It really depends on one's temperament or one's personality. That has to do with women artists too. There are all sorts of conflicts with being a woman artist, for instance. There are some artists who just stand in front of their painting one to one, and they don't have any assistance or any help. They are really private and that's the way they probably like it. Joseph Cornell seemed like that. I used to know him quite well. He worked in his basement, in his habitat, as he called it, and he had these little boxes that he put things in and made adjustments, and he had a very peculiar kind of life, I think. He was very concerned with his brother and his mother. He had a brother who was a spastic person from something. And then there are the opposite end. Take a guy like Bob Rauschenberg that has an entourage, or like Andy Warhol, who has a whole lot of people around him. I have about ten people working, old and young, and we have traveled all over. Some people prefer to be alone, like Greta Garbo, other people like to have tons and tons of people around them. I like to have nice people around. I run into a lot of great people. Over the past 35 years, I probably have had 35 or 40 assistants, who all wanted to be artists, and they're not. They're something different. They're a vice president in an electronics firm, or one person went to work with the BBC back in London. They've done different kinds of things. Life took them elsewhere. They didn't do painting, they weren't involved in the theater or the movies or painting or sculpture or something like that.

It's a hard life, isn't it, to be an artist full time?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. James Rosenquist: I think being an artist is having courage to be original. It's hard to describe, because many great artists, including Picasso, have all been influenced by the great master paintings, Spanish paintings, whatever. Their art has looked like them, they've been influenced by them, and then finally, they leap, they take off. And then they become themselves. Then it looks like they just came out of nowhere. Just like, "Pow!" So I'm a reactionary, and I sort of -- I don't like my work to look like anyone else's. So 20 or 30 years ago, I knew a Japanese artist who won a scholarship to Majorca, and when he got there, he met a Swedish artist who was doing the same kind of calligraphy, so both of them promptly stopped that. So with the advent of communication, and the word getting around, and photographs getting around, I think that it's less likely to copy, or to unknowingly work in a similar vein. And I think that's interesting. But I think it's important to learn how -- it's important to study, to learn. To polish up on drawing, which is very academic. Like drawing from plaster casts, because it's handy to be able to know how to do that. And then when you have everything polished, and all your senses ready, then if an idea does happen, you can do something about it. You can maybe convince yourself with your abilities that way. Because a lot of art is well meant, but it looks like child's play, or it looks like anyone could have done that. And it's hard to see through that veil to see what the artist is really getting at.

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