Stowaway Peers Out at the Speed of Light, 2000, oil on canvas, 17 x 46 ft.

Like all well-curated retrospectives, this exhibition allows reassessment of the work of an artist that, because he is so well known and such an art historical figure, has become a victim of assumptions associated with the pop era. The scale of the exhibition and the Guggenheim building allow the viewer to see two perspectives on Rosenquist's work. The first view is that of the slick popist, whose work is machinelike and precise—this is the perception of knowing the works from reproductions or seeing them from a distance. The finish, cohesion and mimetic precision perceived from afar is part of the power of these works. As a billboard painter, Rosenquist was trained to think in terms of his works being viewed at a great distance, and he paints for this resolution through optical diminution.

The second perspective afforded by this exhibition is intimate. Viewing these works from a few feet away yields an unexpected painterliness. This effect is akin to seeing details of the restored Sistine Ceiling—painted figures to be viewed from a distance that also delight in their expressive and unexpected application of fresco. The exhibition's curators were careful to include Rosenquist's early abstract expressionist works. At first, these seem a neat anchor for the chronology, but in examining the billboard-sized figurative works, one realizes that Rosenquist never loses his painterly touch, and at times, even remains expressionistic in his handling of paint.

In certain passages, Rosenquist paints what one might expect to encounter close up—sharply realistic images. These elements, like the Pegasus in Paper Clip (1973), though, are distinctive from his usual style of broad strokes and are used as repoussoir devices that create depth by floating above the overall image. In this way, Rosenquist shows that what we expect to see up close is used to achieve another effect. The sharp, masked lines of later "cross hatched" works possessing the "lenticular" effect (such as the Flora and Florida series) also display an ambiguity of space, especially as the sharply juxtaposed images are painted in Rosenquist's signature summary style.

Looking again across the Guggenheim's atrium at a work first viewed up-close results in a certain disconnect—the subject is recognized, but the technique seems altered, especially as the painterliness seems lost in the distance. Rosenquist is shown as a painter's painter—a master of a near-extinct commercial technique and its summary/mimetic paradox.

Seemingly non-objective passages in works such as Flamingo Capsule (1970) or Dog Descending a Staircase (1979) make it clear that Rosenquist has always been interested in not just abstraction, but the situation of making the nonobjective out of the objective. Just as Aaron Siskind created paradoxical abstract compositions with the camera's objective eye, Rosenquist uses the mimetic commercial style to create imagery that is at once non-figurative and concrete. Understanding of this paradox invites a reassessment of Rosenquist's work that gives primacy to the abstraction. Wasn't the spaghetti of I Love You with My Ford (1961) and F-111 (1965) always an expressionist abstraction? Lesser-known spaghetti works with neutral ab-ex tiles like Orange Field (1964) seem to indicate so. The exhibition is also neatly bookended by the new Speed of Light (2002-3) abstractions. These new works vacillate from near formless metallic reflections to the completely nonobjective and remind us that all along, Rosenquist has been abstracting images through dramatic shifts of scale.

William V. Ganis