TIME PIECES.(James Rosenquist, painting, Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York, New York)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 27-OCT-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The James Rosenquist retrospective now at the Guggenheim turns Frank Lloyd Wright's helix into a pinball machine. Your ambulatory gaze is the rolling ball. The paintings and the occasional sculpture are lights and bumpers, emitting tacit dings and thoks when struck. Rosenquist--one of the big three masters of American Pop painting, with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein--has always striven, as a matter of earnest principle, to make his works befuddlingly sensational at first sight. The show's installation on Wright's ramp, by the curators Walter Hopps and Sarah Bancroft, amplifies spectacle to a pitch of happy panic. The consequences are mixed. Rosenquist's best work exhibits firm formal command and deft philosophical nuance, rewarding contemplation, and these aspects of the art suffer. One notes them numbly, in passing. Conversely, inferior works--mostly from the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when Rosenquist regularly indulged in overbearing, mere razzmatazz--come off rather better than they deserve. The show's off-ramp, rectilinear galleries provide oases of discrimination. One room contains the artist's masterpiece, "F-111" (1964-65), which has long had my vote as the Great American Painting. Another displays collage studies for that work, which, in a scrappier sort of way, are as prepossessing as Picasso's drawings for "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."

Pinball machines are obsolete, of course, in the manner...

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