“On a hunch I started looking through old Life magazines and avidly collecting them. I was cutting out pages of Life and as I was looking at them I began to say to myself, This stuff is ridiculous. Even the cigarette ads were bizarre.”
—James RosenquistIn Brighter than the Sun, Rosenquist embraces collage for the purpose of abstraction, his original source images from magazine ads and catalogues transforming consumer culture into something wholly original. In the lower right corner of the composition, highly exposed shapes in black and white were once stocking-clad legs from a Burlington Mills advertisement, now fragmented and manipulated. Female legs are often fetishized in advertising, but under Rosenquist’s able command, the legs are cropped and colored such that they have almost entirely lost their recognizability as a seductive human form.
Source for Brighter than the Sun. 1961. Collage and mixed media on paper. 11 ½” x 17 ¾” (29.2 x 45.1 cm). Private Collection © James Rosenquist Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Rosenquist very rarely let brand names appear in the clippings he used from magazine advertisements to avoid drawing attention to the source product itself. As seen in the source collage for Brighter than the Sun, the Oxydol label featured in the upper left corner has been entirely removed, completely displacing the sunset-like arcs from their original context on a box of bleach. For many years, Rosenquist hid these source collages from the public and his studio visitors because he did not want his intentions to be misunderstood or for undue meaning to be affixed to his work. It wasn’t until 1992 that he allowed the publication and exhibition of these collages, and even then, he did so with some apprehension. Had he never released the source of Brighter than the Sun, we may never have recognized the bleach brand or fabric company, proving the artist’s ingenious manipulation of advertorial images. His annotation upon the collage further illuminates the layered meaning of the title: the rings on the packaging for a brightening bleach become the blinding brightness of a nuclear explosion under Rosenquist’s artistic command.
Literature
Constance Glenn 57
218
Brighter than the Sun (G. 57)
1972
Lithograph in colors, on German Copperplate paper, with full margins.
I. 18 7/8 x 29 1/8 in. (47.9 x 74 cm)
S. 28 x 38 in. (71.1 x 96.5 cm)
Signed, titled, dated and numbered 'A.P 10/20' in pencil (an artist's proof, the edition was 60, there were also 20 artist's proofs), published by Petersburg Press, New York, unframed.
Estimate
$600 - 900
Sold for $3,048
Works from the James Rosenquist Estate
New York Auction 15 February 2024
