James Rosenquist, Fahrenheit 1982 (Hand Signed card), from the Estate of UACC President Cordelia Platt, 2003

James Rosenquist

Fahrenheit 1982 (Hand Signed card), 1982

Offset lithograph card

Boldly signed in black marker by James Rosenquist on the bottom center of the image

James Rosenquist - Fahrenheit 1982 (Hand Signed card), from the Estate of UACC President Cordelia Platt, 2003

This offset lithograph card is boldly signed in black marker on the image part of the card by James Rosenquist. It depicts Rosenquist's opus magnus "Fahrenheit 1982", his 1982 colored ink on mylar painting in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum. The first part of the title is an allusion to Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel "Fahrenheit 451", a dystopian view of the future United States - a title that would later inspire filmmakers like Michael Moore. But first there was Rosenquist's Fahrenheit 1982. Here's how the Whitney describes this work:

"Although James Rosenquist’s paintings of the 1980s exhibited a newly aggressive tone, they featured many of the same elements that secured his reputation as a foremost Pop artist in the early 1960s: disorienting juxtapositions of enlarged fragments of images that were, in his words, “apart from nature.” Borrowed from photographs and magazine reproductions, they acknowledge the saturation of everyday American life by the mass media. Fahrenheit 1982 Degrees is typical of Rosenquist’s long, mural-size works, in which ordinary items assume heroic proportions, such as the polished fingernail that mysteriously metamorphoses into the tip of a fountain pen. The painting’s hot pink and red palette, as well as its assortment of phallic lipsticks that project toward the surface like bullets, charge the image with an erotic force whose power is accentuated by notations of motion, such as the swirling loops around the finger..."

Provenance of this signed card is excellent: it is from the Estate and private autograph collection of Cordelia Platt. Highly regarded in the autograph industry, Cordelia was the president of the UACC (United Autograph Collectors Club) and a well known dealer for many years. She was official authenticator of Marilyn Monroe. This piece was in Ms. Platt's private collection for 20 years before it was sold.

This work has been elegantly float framed in a museum quality white wood frame under UV plexiglass.

Measurements:

Framed

9.25 inches (vertical) by 15 inches (horizontal) by 2 inches

Signed card:

4 inches (vertical) by 9.75 inches (horizontal)

JAMES ROSENQUIST BIOGRAPHY

b. 1933, Grand Forks, North Dakota; d. 2017, New York

Born in 1933 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, James Rosenquist studied art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts as a teenager and at the University of Minnesota between 1952 and 1954, painting billboards during the summers. In 1955 he moved to New York to study at the Art Students League. He left the school after one year, and in 1957 returned to life as a commercial artist, painting billboards in Times Square and across the city. By 1960, he quit painting billboards and rented a small studio space in Manhattan where his neighbors included artists Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman. In 1962, he had his first solo exhibition at the Green Gallery in New York, and afterward was included in a number of groundbreaking group exhibitions that established Pop art as a movement.

Rosenquist achieved international acclaim with his room-scale painting, F-111 (1965). In addition to painting, he has produced a vast array of prints, drawings, and collages; his print Time Dust (1992) is thought to be the largest print in the world, measuring seven by thirty-five feet. The artist has received numerous honors; he was selected as the Art in America Young Talent Painter in 1963, appointed to a six-year term on the Board of the National Council on the Arts in 1978, and nominated as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1987. Since his first early career retrospectives in 1972, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, he has been the subject of gallery and museum exhibitions in the U.S. and internationally. He continues to produce large-scale commissions, including the three-painting suite The Swimmer in the Econo-mist (1997–98) for Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and a 1998 mural conceived for the ceiling of the Palais de Chaillot in Paris; but, when unable to be installed in the intended site due to technological difficulties, it was finally exhibited at Art Basel 2006. In 2003, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum mounted a major retrospective of his works, which traveled to the Menil Collection, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. From his early days as a billboard painter to his recent masterful use of abstract painting techniques, Rosenquist has demonstrated his continuing interest in and mastery of color, line, and shape, and continues to dazzle audiences and influence younger generations of artists. Rosenquist died in 2017 in New York.
-Courtesy Guggenheim