“I saw a tumbleweed as big as a house going across the road as I was driving in Texas…”
—James Rosenquist Tumbleweed is based upon Rosenquist’s 1967-68 sculpture of the same name. The sculpture’s form is composed of three two-by-fours wrapped in chrome-plated barbed wire and neon. In reproducing the massive Texan tumbleweed he encountered, Rosenquist was dwelling upon “capitalism and shiny barbed wire that keeps people in prison,” the effects of the Berlin Wall, and seeing animals hung up on barbwire fences in North Dakota after floods in the spring.i,ii Further, mimicking the twisted nature of a tumbleweed, the winding string of neon, Rosenquist thought, resembled a rabbit going through a barricade.
The lithographic tumbleweed provides insight into Rosenquist’s creative process through printed notes, which offer Rosenquist’s ideas on the placement of the twisted neon, how to embed the necessary wattage within the sculpture, and the Texas-sized five-foot diameter of the object. As such, Tumbleweed stands as a printed guide to one of Rosenquist’s rare sculptural endeavors, distilling the artist’s three-dimensional vision to a two-dimensional plane.
1970 Lithograph in colors, on black Fabriano paper, the full sheet. S. 21 3/4 x 29 1/2 in. (55.2 x 74.9 cm) Signed, titled, dated and numbered 'trial proof 4/6' in pencil (the edition was 68 and 10 artist's proofs), co-published by Castelli Graphics and Hollanders Workshop, New York, framed.