Pop Art Goes Viral: From New York City to Europe, Rosenquist’s F-111 Takes Flight

In the early 1960s, James Rosenquist was in all the right places. His first Pop art canvases were made at a studio on Coenties Slip, his first show at Green Gallery sold out in 1962, and Rosenquist was included in all the earliest Pop art shows in NYC and beyond. In 1964–65, energy was building around his latest and largest work to date, F-111. With curators, gallerists, and artists amassing at Rosenquist’s Broome Street studio to see the work progress, the big reveal of F-111 at Leo Castelli Gallery in the spring of 1965 was matched by an instantaneous international interest. By September, museum director Pontus Hultén was exhibiting the work at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. From there, the work went viral across Europe, a serendipitous journey that sent the work to Bern, Amsterdam, Rome, Paris, and beyond. In Europe, Moderna Museet proved to be a site of influence as strong as NYC, where the primordial soup of American Pop art was first stirred and tasted. This talk explores the people and places that fostered this nascent movement, with a nod to the European distribution and consumption of this dynamic movement. 

Curator and art historian Sarah C. Bancroft is Executive Director of the James Rosenquist Foundation, and President of the Board of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. Her curatorial projects include James Rosenquist: A Retrospective (Guggenheim Museum, 2003–2005), James Rosenquist: Illustrious Works on Paper, Illuminating Paintings (OSU Museum of Art, 2015–2016), Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series (Orange County Museum of Art, 2011–2012), Richard Diebenkorn (Royal Academy of Art, 2015), 2010 California Biennial (Orange County Museum of Art), and other projects.