James Rosenquist - Works from the James Rosenquist Estate New York Thursday, February 15, 2024 | Phillips

Works from the James Rosenquist Estate

New York Auction 15 February 2024

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  •  “There’s a reflection in your eye that causes strange things to happen.”
    —James Rosenquist    Fascinated with vision across his career, Circles of Confusion represents one of Rosenquist’s earliest printed forays into the world of optics, later tackling subjects such as eye exams and color blindness tests. The term “circles of confusion” refers to the optical phenomenon experienced when pointing a camera lens into the sun or other light source, causing as Rosenquist described them, “little balls of color that start moving around,” elaborating “or the aperture is reflected inside the camera into a circle, the same way in your eye – theres a reflection in your eye that causes strange things to happen. And it was like trying to find something while looking at a light bulb.” i

    Rosenquist filming inside the installation Horizon Home Sweet Home, 1970. Courtesy of the Estate of James Rosenquist.

    Rosenquist’s interest in visual phenomena perhaps began in his youth, the artist recalling a childhood story while living in the Plains: “as a little kid at sunset and the sun is in back of me, and walking across the horizon is a Trojan horse four stories tall. I go, ‘Uh-oh—what's that?’ So I run in the house and say, ‘Look! Look at the big horse!’ It was the neighbor’s white stallion, which had got loose, caught the light in the heat, and it looked four stories tall. These kinds of little things make, I think, the curiosity, or the inquisitiveness, that make an artist.”ii This anecdote of adolescent tricks of vision also reiterates Rosenquist’s manipulation of scale; while typically choosing to scale images up, Circles of Confusion features tiny and tinier images of the GE logo infiltrating the hazily colored dots, as if in a dream. 

     

    Rosenquist and his mother, Ruth, Grand Forks, North Dakota, ca. 1935. Courtesy of the Estate of James Rosenquist.

    According to Rosenquist, the title also evokes notions of identity crisis and the nature of patriotism during the Vietnam War. While visiting a plastics factory in Dallas, he was surprised to find “a big dish of American flags.”iii Associates of the factory told him they were being made for General Electric workers, with the intention that they would display them on their car aerials to indicate their patriotism; those who chose not to, by implication, lacked patriotism. To Rosenquist, the practice symbolized “something like McCarthyism” rather than patriotism, harkening back to the notions of perception that cause photographic circles of confusion. 

     

     

    i  Jeanne Siegel, “An Interview with James Rosenquist,” Artforum vol. 10, no. 2 (1972), p. 31.

    ii Walter Hopps, “Connoisseur of the Inexplicable” in Walter Hopps and Sarah Bancroft, James Rosenquist: A Retrospective, 2003, p. 3.

    iii  Constance Glenn, James Rosenquist: Time Dust, Complete Graphics 1962 -1992, 1993, pp. 12-13.

    • Literature

      Constance Glenn 10

200

James Rosenquist

Circles of Confusion, from 11 Pop Artists, Volume I (G. 10)

1965
Screenprint in colors, on Beckett paper, the full sheet.
S. 23 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. (60.6 x 50.5 cm)
Signed and numbered 'XXXIX' in pencil (one of 50 artist's proofs in Roman numerals, the edition was 200), published by Original Editions, New York, framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$800 - 1,200 

Sold for $2,794

Works from the James Rosenquist Estate

New York Auction 15 February 2024