The Slip by Prudence Peiffer

Author:Prudence Peiffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

17

The American Dream

1961–63

IN THE LATE FALL of 1960, Rosenquist began painting on the back of several thin Masonite panels that he’d recycled from his old job. They barely fit into his studio, almost scraping the tin ceiling, and in the end, the full composition stretched the length of a Chevy sedan. He was done with the abstract works that he realized he had made only in order to distance himself from his day job, but it was tricky to work in the larger-than-life realism of a billboard painter and be making something for art rather than advertising.

Onto the left panel, Rosenquist painted the smiling head of the politician John F. Kennedy, just elected, about to be sworn in as the first president born in the twentieth century and the youngest in history, offering the United States a “new frontier” stretching all the way to the moon. Kennedy’s face, bigger than a door and with teeth the size of toasters, seems to be taped with paint strokes, like the glue brushed over a tissue paper collage, to an image of manicured hands breaking apart a layered slice of moist cake, and this attached to the side of a gleaming auto in the far-right panel. Rosenquist at first portrayed a flipped car on fire, but then painted over this and added a standard, “flat, ugly Chevrolet.” Its banal, reflective surface distilled an image of America coming out of a postwar period of unprecedented commercial growth, entering a new decade already showing the strain of so much optimism amid so much discordant reality. As he was working, Rosenquist placed the panel with Kennedy’s face in the window of his Slip loft, near where his studio mate Charles Hinman usually worked at his easel, so that anyone looking up might see the incoming president smiling blankly out in the middle of a row of warehouse lofts, a vision no doubt disorienting for the quiet street’s main travelers: vagrants and tipsy sailors returning late to Jeannette Park or the Seamen’s Church Institute.

* * *

LIKE THE OTHER paintings Rosenquist was starting at the time, President Elect used the materials of the artist’s old job, stitching together incongruous advertising images that all promised something. Kennedy’s portrait was lifted from a black-and-white campaign poster photo (Rosenquist was struck by how the politician “already looked like an ad”); the devil’s food cake mix and the car were both dredged from ads in the piles of Life magazines lying around his studio. Rosenquist painted the oversaturated, bruised-peach colors of Kennedy’s skin based on his memory of seeing Kennedy down at the seaport on Broad Street “in a convertible whizzing by with a bright orange face.” It wasn’t a subtle picture—Rosenquist wasn’t interested in that—but like the work of his Slipmate Indiana, it contained an enigmatic sum of contemporary culture in its forthright referents. What ties an incoming president to moist dessert to a car? The painting’s passive voice—images pilfered, not imagined, and their incongruity allowing potential metaphors to pile up into everything and nothing—was disconcerting.

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