James Rosenquist’s The Kabuki Blushes, 1984, named after the Japanese style of theater in which the actors would wear dramatic makeup, combines the artist’s unique visual language and preoccupations into one painting. Reflecting a variety of art historical techniques, the present work presents a Pop image through a Surrealist lens. Coming from a Los Angeles private collection where it has been since the 1990s, the present work has been included in major exhibitions around the world, including in Valencia and Moscow, both in 1991.

In The Kabuki Blushes, half of a woman’s face is rendered in Rosenquist’s precise, almost photorealist style. The image of her face is rotated 180 degrees, cropped against the upper right corner of the canvas. She is wearing white face makeup, which blends into the neutral background. As if painted using the eponymous kabuki brush used to apply the theater makeup, her dramatic makeup is shown just on the woman’s eyes and nose, while her expression and body are obscured by the red and black lines running energetically across the composition. These diagonals relate at once to the cross-hatching technique that Rosenquist would come to use in his paintings and prints, and to the rhythmic dragging of both the paint and makeup brushes in active, short strokes. The reference to and execution of these painterly techniques sets Rosenquist apart from his Pop contemporaries – rather than using mechanical methods as his means of artistic production like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Rosenquist chose to paint by hand, imbuing the present work with a painterly flair.

Obscuring Imagery

Often borrowing images from magazines and advertisements, which he saw many of during his time as a billboard painter, Rosenquist infuses his found imagery with a distinct Surrealist twist. In the present work, the image of the female figure is largely concealed by the dynamic composition of the painting. The frenetic lines flitting across both ends of the canvas disrupt the act of looking for the viewer, failing to provide us with a central area or subject to place our focus. Rendered in vibrant, floral designs, the lines seem to have been cut from another image and laid over the present work. This landscape inspired imagery is simultaneously disrupting the woman’s face and being disrupted, each image struggling to emerge victorious over the other. The act of layering disparate scenes and images atop one another is signature within Rosenquist’s practice and creates a sense of three-dimensionality within the otherwise flat picture plane. Borrowing from the Surrealists, the diagonals in the present work relate immediately to René Magritte’s The Blank Signature, The National Gallery of Art, whose tree trunks disrupt the image of the woman in a similar manner as the landscape interrupts the figure. As such, The Kabuki Blushes reflects Rosenquist’s mastery of fusing disparate art historical references and images into one unique result, challenging our pre-conceived notions of art and artmaking.