James Rosenquist - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York Wednesday, November 15, 2023 | Phillips

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  • In the present work, three canvases are positioned next to one another, each depicting strange and seemingly disparate scenes – a metal spool being formed at a factory in the far left, a dog walking down a set of stairs in the center, and a doll’s head positioned against a pale green background in the right square canvas. Self-described by the artist as “bleak” images, the paintings which make up James Rosenquist’s seminal Dog Descending a Staircase, 1979, reflect a surrealist interpretation of a domestic scene – the doll symbolizing a wife, the dog, the husband, and the tin mill image, his job. Imbuing the scene with a Pop-like sensibility rendered by hand, Rosenquist creates a commentary on everyday objects and subjects, instilling them with new meanings. First shown to the public at Castelli-Feigen-Corcoran Gallery in 1980, the painting was later reproduced in the form of a lithograph, created in an edition of 33.

     

    James Rosenquist, F-111, 1964–1965 Image: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY, Artwork: © 2023 James Rosenquist Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 

    Dog Descending a Staircase, was included in the artist’s groundbreaking retrospective at the Menil Collection and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which then traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2003–2004. On the occasion of this exhibition, Frances Colpitt referred to the work as a “marvelous stepped triptych,” calling Rosenquist’s 1970s output “less experimental but with a sophisticated, complex and deeply resonant range of color.” These works “showed Rosenquist to be more facile in technique and comfortable with his style.”i  Just over nine feet long, the triptych showcases Rosenquist at his strongest. A museum quality piece, this work relates in scale and composition to other monumental, multi-part works by the artist held in renowned museum collections around the world, including the massively impressive F-111, 1964–1965, in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

     

    James Rosenquist in Times Square, 1958. Courtesy of Acquavella Galleries.

    Using expressive brushstrokes like those of his contemporaries Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline in his earliest paintings, Rosenquist abandoned those upon moving to Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan in 1960, pulling from his experience as a billboard painter to inform his burgeoning Pop style. Though a seminal figure within the Pop movement, Rosenquist continued to paint by hand rather than rely on the mechanical techniques of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Rosenquist’s painterly approach is particularly evident in the left canvas of Dog Descending a Staircase, where a sunset lit sky is rendered with a swirl of cool into warm hues, beneath which the reflective surface of the machinery is built up with layer and layers of brushstrokes. This is illustrative of Colpitt’s claim that these 1970s works indeed possess a “deeply resonant range of color.” 

      

    “The essence is to take very disparate imagery and put it together and the result becomes an idea, not so much a picture. It’s like listening to the radio and getting your own idea from all these images that are often antidotes—acid—to each other. They make sparks or they don’t.”
    —James Rosenquist

     

    Referencing Marcel Duchamp’s Cubist masterpiece Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art, in its title, the present work relies on the left to right orientation of the work to inform the composition, using the staggered canvases, which are an extension of the three steps in the center panel. As a reference, this equates Duchamp’s nude to Rosenquist’s titular dog. However, in Rosenquist’s rendition, the movements of the dog are rendered flat.  Rosenquist was inspired by many of the Surrealists, as demonstrated by this painting’s fragmented imagery placed across the three canvases, broken up by color and scale. The result disrupts the reading of the painting and distorts the viewer’s understanding of the narrative, while instilling suspense. “One waits for the dog to move, the doll to blink, the spool to wind.”ii

     

    Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912 / Philadelphia Museum of Art / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Association Marcel Duchamp.

    Exploring the idea of peripheral vision, Rosenquist painted this work on a grand scale, in which the canvas, like a billboard, is too large to see in one glimpse. By placing three offset canvases to create an atypical landscape, Rosenquist was exploring the ways in which he could connect these fragments into one, cohesive and enticing painting. As noted by the artist, “I had a real thrust and thought—how can I use these magnified fragments to make an abstract painting? I thought I could change people’s heads around by forcing them to identify these fragments at a certain rate of speed. It was a way to put mystery into my art... Everyone [else] was smearing and splashing. I knew that whatever I did my art wasn’t going to look like everyone else’s.”iii Indeed, Rosenquist’s oeuvre and Dog Descending a Staircase in particular places him in a league of his own, providing both a contrast to and referral back to the early beginnings of the Pop movement, in which artists strove to challenge the way we process and interpret the images in front of us.

     

     

    Frances Colpitt, “James Rosenquist,” artUS, November–December 2003, p. 46.

    ii Elizabeth Frank, “James Rosenquist at Castelli-Feigen-Corcoran,” Art in America, November 1980.

    iii James Rosenquist, quoted in Judith Goldman, James Rosenquist: The Early Pictures 1961–1964, exh. Cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 1992, pp. 91, 98–100.

    • Provenance

      Private Collection, London (acquired directly from the artist)
      Sotheby's Parke Bernet, New York, May 12, 1981, lot 60
      Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      New York, Castelli-Feigen-Corcoran Gallery, Rosenquist, May 17–June 14, 1980
      New York, The Whitney Museum of Art, 1981 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, February 4–April 5, 1981, p. 95
      Houston, The Menil Collection and The Museum of Fine Arts; New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, James Rosenquist: A Retrospective, May 17, 2003–October 2004, no. 92, pp. 184–185 (illustrated, p. 185)

    • Literature

      "Goings on about Town: Art," The New Yorker, vol. 56, no. 14, May 26, 1980, p. 11
      "Goings on about Town: Art," The New Yorker, vol. 56, no. 15, June 2, 1980, p. 14
      "Goings on about Town: Art," The New Yorker, vol. 56, no. 16, June 9, 1980, p. 13
      "Goings on about Town: Art," The New Yorker, vol. 56, no. 17, June 16, 1980, p. 12
      Nina French-Frazier, "A New York Letter: James Rosenquist," Art International, vol. XXIV/1-2, September–October 1980, p. 82
      Elizabeth Frank, "Review of Exhibitions: James Rosenquist at Castelli-Feigen-Corcoran," Art in America, vol. 68, no. 9, November 1980, p. 137
      Les Krantz, ed., The New York Art Review, New York, 1982, p. 68 (illustrated)
      Valerie F. Brooks, "Rosenquist's Market: Pop Art Performs," ARTnews, vol. 83, no. 3, New York, March 1984, p. 27
      Judith Goldman, James Rosenquist, New York, 1985, p. 165 (illustrated)
      James Rosenquist, exh. cat., Denver Art Museum, Denver, 1985, pp. 165, 188 (illustrated, p. 165)
      Mary Anne Staniszewski, "Corporate Culture," Manhattan, Inc., July 1986, p. 127 (illustrated)
      Holland Cotter, "Advertisements for a Mean Utopia," Art in America, vol. 75, no. 1, January 1987, pp. 88–89 (illustrated, p. 89)
      James Rosenquist: Welcome to the Water Planet and House of Fire 1988–1989, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 15
      Susan Brundage, ed., James Rosenquist The Big Paintings, Thirty Years Leo Castelli, New York, 1994, n.p. (illustrated)
      William Jeffett, James Rosenquist: Paintings, James Rosenquist: Selects Dali, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2000, pp. 12, 15 (illustrated, p. 12)
      Emily Braun, "Sex, Lies, and History," Modernism/modernity, vol. 10, no. 4, November 2003, p. 748
      Frances Colpitt, "James Rosenquist," artUS, November–December 2003, p. 46
      Richard Kalina, "James Rosenquist at Full Scale," Art in America, February 2004, p. 135
      James Rosenquist and David Dalton, Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art, New York, 2009, pp. 241–242 (illustrated, p. 242)

Ο◆129

Dog Descending a Staircase

oil on canvas
85 x 113 3/4 in. (215.9 x 288.9 cm)
Painted in 1979.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$500,000 - 700,000 

Sold for $736,600

Contact Specialist

Annie Dolan
Specialist, Head of Sale, Morning Session
+1 212 940 1288
adolan@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session

New York Auction 15 November 2023