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©
James Rosenquist Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
James Rosenquist

Smoked Glass

1962
Oil on canvas.
61 x 81.5 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
728
(
1977.20
)
Room 52
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room

Whereas Roy Lichtenstein enlarged synthetic comic strip images and reproduced them manually to explore the complex connections between art and popular culture, James Rosenquist combined the iconography of advertising and mass media in his painting in order to express his view of modern life, plagued as it was with new products and new offers. Rosenquist arrived in New York in 1955 and became known as a result of his exhibition at the Green Gallery in 1962 showing works that belonged to what was then called the New Realism movement, which later gave rise to Pop Art. His chief source of inspiration would be magazine advertisements, which he modified using his original language, transforming them into criticisms of American society. His method of working, which involved creating images from other images, is fully in keeping with Pop Art, but for him the essential content stemmed from the confrontation of the different fragments within his painting, as occurred, for example, with Surrealist collage.

In Rosenquist’s painting that which is visible is not always easily identifiable. Although his paintings incorporate real objects and people, rendered with an almost photographic realism, they lose their literal quality on account of the manner in which they are framed or the zoom effect of his angle of vision. His stint as a painter of billboards in Times Square was influential in shaping his preference for extremely enlarged images. Smoked Glass, dated 1962, shows a foreground fragment in grisaille of the face of a woman smoking and the headlamp from a Ford car, the same model that features in a painting executed the previous year, I Love You with My Ford. The prominence of the woman’s parted lips exhaling cigarette smoke is an explicit reference to the use of sexual images in cigarette advertisements as means of encouraging consumption.

Paloma Alarcó

20th Centurys. XX - Arte pop en NorteaméricaPaintingOilcanvas
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Smoked Glass. Vidrio ahumado, 1962
Smoked Glass
James Rosenquist

©

James Rosenquist Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Smoked Glass. Vidrio ahumado, 1962
Smoked Glass
James Rosenquist

©

James Rosenquist Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Terms of Use

The Photo Library of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza offers sale and rental service of photographic material of all the works on its Permanent Collection.

To request images or permits for commercial use in academic or research publications, that is, catalogues of other institutions, monographs and other specialized publications, you should contact the Museum's Photo Library by email at the e-mail @email.

To request images or permits for other commercial or advertising uses (general publications, merchandising, exhibitions, audio-visual works, web pages, etc.), you should contact the Museum's Commercial Archive by email at the e-mail @email.

The Photo Library and the Museum's Commercial Archive manage the worldwide distribution of images of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza works, as well as their reproduction rights. The applicable rates are calculated based on the nature and proposed use of the images, as well as the availability of the requested image.

Requests for scans or new photographs will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Once approved, an additional fee will apply. Re-photographing a work will require a minimum of six weeks to complete.

However, photographed works are protected by copyright. Therefore, regardless of the terms of use of the photographs set out below by the Foundation, it will be necessary to obtain a license from  VEGAP (Visual Entidad de Gestión de Artistas Plásticos www.vegap.es) or from the corresponding collective management organizations in the country where the work is going to be used or, where appropriate, from the holder of their rights in order to reproduce or exploit the work.

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