Lobel ’90 Studies 1960s Pop Artist James Rosenquist

Michael Lobel ’90 is the author of James Rosenquist: Pop Art, Politics, and History in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2009), the first full-length scholarly volume devoted to the artist.

Rosenquist’s paintings, notable for their billboard-sized images of commercial subjects, are emblematic of 1960s Pop Art. The artist’s startling and provocative imagery deals with some of the major political and historical events of that turbulent decade, from the Kennedy assassination to the war in Vietnam.

Lobel combines close visual analysis with extensive archival research, He provides social and historical contexts in which these paintings were produced and suggests new readings of a body of work that helped redefine art in the 1960s within the burgeoning consumer culture of postwar America.

Michael Lobel is associate professor of art history and director of the MA program in modern and contemporary art, criticism, and theory at Purchase College, State University of New York. His previous books include Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art and Fugitive Artist: The Early Work of Richard Prince 1974–77.