When Pop art emerged in the early 1960s it was greeted by both its critics and its defenders as a celebration of the various facets of popular American culture featured in the works themselves. By the end of the decade, however, some critics and historians were already arguing against the hegemonic view of the movement by claiming that certain of its practitioners, at least, were using popular subjects and styles to challenge mainstream cultural values. Michael Lobel’s monograph on the early work of James Rosenquist is the latest addition to that ongoing scholarly current.

Since its exhibition in 1968 at the Metropolitan Museum, Rosenquist’s F-111 (1964–65) has been perhaps the primary example of the possibility that Pop could be culturally resistant. Even in Rosenquist’s own oeuvre the painting has been generally understood as an anomaly. Lobel argues, instead, that the work is simply the full realization of a critical sensibility that on closer examination is evident in his work from the beginning of his career. Rosenquist’s early Pop paintings featuring assorted fragments of advertising imagery must be understood not in the context of Surrealism, which is ordinarily invoked in discussions of his work, but within a nexus of culturally critical writings from around 1960 that marked the end of the postwar era of cultural consensus, including disapproving articles on planned obsolescence and the proliferation of billboards, as well as a number of now-classic books: Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image; Or, What Happened to the American Dream (1961), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Peter Blake’s God’s Own Junkyard (1964), and two by Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuader’s (1957) and The Waste Makers (1960). Although Lobel offers no evidence that Rosenquist or any members of his circle either read or were familiar with these writings, he does find it suggestive that Packard’s Waste Makers “was published . . . just about the same time Rosenquist was making his earliest forays into incorporating advertising imagery into his paintings” (61). Even the absence of any remarks by the artist himself that would suggest a similar intention would not be problematic if Rosenquist’s early work conveyed similar messages, but Lobel’s attempts to make that case are not entirely convincing. While he demonstrates that the artist was personally engaged with the kinds of issues discussed in that literature, his book’s claim that Rosenquist meant from the first to communicate those concerns, thereby contributing to that critical discourse, is perhaps overstated.

Lobel’s reading of Zone (1961), the artist’s first Pop painting, is typical of his analytic approach. A woman’s smiling face, taken from an ad for a skin lotion, is juxtaposed with the “dewy flesh” (17) of what has been assumed to be a tomato, although its identity, as Lobel admits, is ambiguous. According to Lobel, the sharp contrast of face and fruit “critically transfigure[s]” a typical advertising device. By bringing to the fore “otherwise unnoticed effects and meanings embedded in advertising imagery” (22), Rosenquist “both calls attention to and disrupts such techniques of persuasion” (16), thereby promoting a critical perspective not unlike that provided in Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders. In short, pictures such as Zone “worked toward a similar end” (21). The chief problem with this argument is that the likening of women and fruits is not an important advertising device. It is, however, a central metaphor in the history of Western art, which is to say that the painting has more to do with women’s issues than with advertising. Admittedly, Rosenquist seems to have approached the matter more self-consciously than his male forebears, thereby creating the possibility of a critical perspective—which is probably Lobel’s point.

The analyses of other works conducted in the first two of Lobel’s five chapters seek critical possibilities not evident to viewers at the time. Despite the absence of stylistic differences in the three suits and ties featured in Rosenquist’s deadpan 1947, 1948, 1950 (1960), Lobel suggests that it effectively echoes arguments then being made by Packard and others concerning the subject of planned obsolescence and the style changes intended to promote wasteful consumption. Rosenquist’s frequent use of older-model cars, such as the front end of the 1950 Ford in his iconic I Love You with My Ford (1961), is according to Lobel part of the same critical agenda to the extent that the mere presence of older cars and body parts “resonates” with the claim made by the auto maker’s harshest critics that annual style changes “obscured the car industry’s failure to make significant mechanical or technological improvements” (27).

Lobel’s determination to read Packardesque intentions in Rosenquist’s early work sometimes prevents him from following the more expansive avenue that his own excellent research opens. Lobel discovered, for example, that Rosenquist was disturbed and saddened by the relentless sacrifice of the architectural past to the imperatives of modernization and that he had attempted to express his feelings on the issue in some of his pre-Pop paintings. A related sense of loss may explain the sad tenor of I Love You with My Ford, and through that his interest in older cars. In an interview published in Artforum in June 1972, Rosenquist told Jeanne Siegel: “I was brought up with automobiles . . . and I used to know the names of all of them. I came . . . to New York and I didn’t know anything that was stylish. I found myself standing on the corner, and things going by, and I couldn’t recognize anything and . . . I began to feel that what was precious . . . was what I could remember” (31).

The uncertain content of Rosenquist’s early work is not fully acknowledged until chapter 3, which focuses on President Elect (1961–64), a depiction of a smiling President Kennedy with an older model Chevrolet and a pair of hands offering cake. Produced after Kennedy’s election, certain passages were reworked in 1964 following his assassination—whether as a way to articulate “two very different moments in the public reception of Kennedy” (87), as Lobel argues, or simply to iron out the awkward passages in the original design, is not clear. Lobel concludes that the painting itself is ambiguous: “a celebration of the hope for abundance and prosperity represented by the Kennedy presidency?” Or an indictment “of the youthful politician’s status as a veritable advertising image . . . equivalent to the pictures used to sell cars and cake mixes?” (73–74)

Lobel’s initial reluctance to accept the indeterminate nature of Rosenquist’s early engagement with politics and consumerism is puzzling given his book’s larger narrative, which is that of the decisive, clarifying effect that the artist’s experience at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair had on the scale and content of his subsequent work. Chapter 4 provides a compelling account of the artist’s apparent dissatisfaction with the inability of his own small, “oblique” (105), and highly personal commission for the New York State Pavilion to challenge or even compete with the visuals at some of the corporate pavilions on the issue at the heart of the fair: the identification of national and corporate interests. The artist’s response to that dissatisfaction was his massive sociopolitical declaration, F-111, produced during the fair.

Chapter 5 offers a model analysis (effectively combining new contextual evidence with sharp formal observations) of that landmark attempt to articulate with greater clarity and effect the artist’s thoughts on the dangerous phenomenon of the military-industrial complex, which President Eisenhower had first warned the nation about in his farewell address of 1961. Lobel’s major contribution to a greater understanding of that work is perhaps his suggestion that the little girl under the hair dryer should be read as the pilot, thereby implicating all supposedly innocent “consumer-citizens who turn a blind eye to the destructiveness of the system under which she or he lives” (144).

My only quarrel with Lobel’s account of the work is his insistence that it was not also meant to be an anti-Vietnam War statement, that this interpretation of the work was largely “the product of later historical revisions” (144). If Rosenquist had meant to evoke the war, Lobel argues, he would have chosen a plane actually in use in Vietnam. For Rosenquist, however, the war could only be understood as an inevitable consequence of the military-industrial complex. According to Judith Goldman’s conversations with Rosenquist, the idea for the painting originated in conversations he had in the fall of 1964 with a reporter for the St. Louis Dispatch on the devastating effects of American bombing on Vietnamese jungles. These discussions started him thinking about the weapons industry and the economy (Judith Goldman, James Rosenquist, New York: Viking Press, 1985, 41). That Rosenquist meant to reference the war is indicated by something that has to my knowledge gone strangely unnoticed by his scholars: the well-known name of the spaghetti behind the nose of the plane, which until recently was marketed as “Franco-American,” a perfect description of the war itself. (I Love You with My Ford includes the same spaghetti, which in part 2 of his interview with Gene Swenson in the February 1964 issue of ARTnews Rosenquist described as “Franco-American.”) In the end, however, Lobel’s book has provided me with a whole new perspective on an artist I thought I knew.