“It’s a marvelous piece, it shows the scale, it shows how Jim could warm up to it, slowly but surely. And you could also see where he was going. He was going to go bigger. But he was not going to give us that pleasure, he was going to make us wait.”
—Ken Tyler, Tyler Graphics master printer
Measuring an astounding eight by ten feet, Time Door Time D’Or from the Welcome to the Water Planet series was the largest feat Rosenquist and Tyler Graphics’ master printer Ken Tyler accomplished together at the time of its creation; Tyler would later refer to the work as the “pièce de resistance” of the series. Time Door Time D’Or shines with a cosmic brilliance as speckled flowers in creams, pinks, and purples explode from the center of a galaxy, surrounding a rectangular spiral floating in space. Upon closer inspection, hints of blue eyes draw in the viewer to reveal the reappearance of female faces like those seen in The Bird of Paradise Approaches the Hot Water Planet (lot 239).
James Rosenquist applying paper pulp to Time Dust with Ken Tyler at Tyler Graphics Ltd., Mount Kisco, New York, 1992. Photo by Marabeth Cohen-Tyler
Rosenquist wanted to cover the paper with dazzling white specks to represent moons and stars, but the size of the paper challenged his ability to spray the color evenly across the entire surface. Rather than abandon or scale down his vision, he innovated. Tyler tells, “The ad hoc device that [Rosenquist initially] made with little dowels certainly wasn’t going to work for this huge and vast expanse of two pieces of paper. We’d solved the problem of how to spray by building a platform that could go over the top with Jim standing on it, spraying down into the pulp through whatever matrix we were going to invent to make these little dots. It turned out that we were going to use pipes, different sized pipes… in a couple weeks we had this beautiful apparatus that had all these various pipes welded to a big structure that we could put on top of wet paper. Jim would go with the moving trolley, spraying through this matrix, and then when it was all done, we’d lift it off and it would create this marvelous halo around each one of the dots as we lifted the pipes out.”i This feat of printmaking ingenuity resulted in a spectacularly elaborate and layered scene that delights and intrigues our imagination.
i Ken Tyler quoted in National Gallery Australia, Rosenquist, 2013, video.
Exhibited
Cologne, Museum Ludwig, James Rosenquist: Painting as Immersion, November 18, 2017 – March 4, 2018 (this impression) ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, James Rosenquist: Painting as Immersion, April 14 – August 19, 2018 (this impression)
Literature
Constance Glenn 218 Stephan Diederich and Yilmaz Dziewior, James Rosenquist: Painting as Immersion, 2017, no. 30, p. 64 (this impression illustrated)
Time Door Time D'Or, from Welcome to the Water Planet (G. 218)
1989 Monumental pressed paper pulp print in colors, on two sheets of TGL handmade paper, with lithographic collage, on Rives BFK paper, the full sheets. S. 96 3/4 x 119 1/2 in. (245.7 x 303.5 cm) Signed, titled, dated and numbered 22/28 in pencil (there were also 12 artist's proofs), published by Tyler Graphics, Ltd., Mount Kisco, New York, framed.