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

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  • “Briefly, it deals with the horrific zoning disfiguring our fair land with its odd juxtapositions of incompatible structures.”
    —James Rosenquist

     

    Reflecting the patchwork of neighborhoods and industrial parks along Florida's Gulf Coast, Industrial Cottage was inspired by Rosenquist seeing a chain-link fence around an old cemetery with a “Mobile Homes for Sale” sign off Route 19; the print’s composition serves as a metaphor for people living next door to polluting industrial sites and the zoning regulations that allow for these types of living arrangements. “In these places you see big American flags and horrible smog so thick people can hardly breathe,” Rosenquist remarked.i The bold imagery of Industrial Cottage gestures towards this reality, wherein domesticity classes with heavy industry.

     

    The drill bits on the right gradually emerge into a sunshine yellow, just below the window of a shack-like dwelling. Fiery strips of bacon, held up by clothespins on a clothesline, are a down-home echo of these precision-tooled bits; an excavator cranes its neck to grab a bite of breakfast. A coaxial copper cable, dug up by the steam shovel, disrupt the clothesline’s horizontal tranquility, branching into a darkly shaded window that frames a high-voltage transmission tower. “If you live near a power station, the juice from the towers emits radiation that will burn out your bulbs. It’s no good for your health.”ii  Metallic grey – the color of heavy industry – at the left, right, and center cooly contrasts against the punch of primary colors.

     

    Source for Industrial Cottage, 1977. Collage and mixed media on paper, with adventitious marks. 14 1/2" x 15" (36.8 x 38.1 cm). Collection of the Estate of James Rosenquist. © James Rosenquist Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

    Imagery of bacon would later be at the center of controversy surrounding Rosenquist’s massive painting Star Thief; the composition, which collages bacon like streaming banners in outer space, among other elements, angered astronaut-turned-airline-executive Frank Borman, who refused to let the work be displayed in Miami International Airport as intended: “space doesn’t look like that. I’ve been to space, and I can assure you there’s no bacon in space. I’ve never seen enormous strips of bacon in outer space.”iii Rosenquist would later retort that “the bacon symbolizes flesh as meat that we eat, as well as the tender fiber of which we are all made,” a sentiment that could be transferred to the bacon of Industrial Cottage, highlighting the vulnerability of those living near industrial parks, like bacon left out to spoil in the open air.

     

    Star Thief, 1980. Oil on canvas. 17' 1" x 46' (520.7 x 1402.1 cm) [205" x 552"]. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Loan Peter and Irene Ludwig foundation, Aachen, 1995 [ML 01621]. Artist registration # 80.11. © James Rosenquist, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

     

     

    i James Rosenquist, Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art, 2009, p. 244.

    ii Ibid.

    iii Ibid, p. 266.

    • Literature

      Constance Glenn 159

228

Industrial Cottage (G. 159)

1978-80
Lithograph in colors, on Arches Cover paper, with full margins.
I. 20 1/4 x 43 3/4 in. (51.4 x 111.1 cm)
S. 26 7/8 x 47 7/8 in. (68.3 x 121.6 cm)

Signed, titled, dated and numbered 41/100 in pencil (there were also 20 artist's proofs), published by Aripeka Ltd., Editions, Aripeka, Florida, unframed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$1,000 - 1,500 

Sold for $2,286

Works from the James Rosenquist Estate

New York Auction 15 February 2024