November 29, 2012

Celebrating Rosenquist

Happy birthday James Rosenquist! The famed artist was born on this day in 1933, in North Dakota. 

Rosenquist is notorious for being the most openly political artist associated with the Pop Art movement. His fragmented imagery drew from many commercial, social, and political sources, often with sharply political implications. 

During the Vietnam War, Rosenquist continued to paint on a large scale but became more openly critical of the American military-industrial complex. This resulted in such controversial works as F-111 Bomber, which fuses images of the “American Dream” with darker suggestions of nuclear war, missiles, and the emblematic US fighter-bomber.

May 17, 2012

Happy Birthday, Dennis Hopper

Dennis Hopper (1936–2010) wasn’t just an Academy Award-nominated actor, director, screenwriter, and notorious bad boy. He was also a visual artist who created acclaimed photographs, paintings, prints, and even the cover art for the Ike & Tina Turner/Phil Spector collaboration, River Deep—Mountain High.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hopper’s photographs have a casually cinematic quality to them, whether focusing on his famous friends and fellow artists—such as these portraits of James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol (and that’s Warhol’s portrait of Hopper, top left)—or strangers, as in his iconic Biker Couple (1961).