A Look Back at the Work of the Pop Art Pioneer James Rosenquist, Who Just Died at 83

Much like his fellow Pop pioneer Andy Warhol, who spent his first decade in New York working as a commercial illustrator, the artist James Rosenquist was able to so acutely capture American pop culture thanks to his own un-bohemian beginnings: He started out painting billboards atop the skyscrapers in Times Square, a day job whose bright, bold colors eventually bled into the abstract paintings he devoted himself to after work. Almost equally oversized, thanks to an abundance of panels—his 86-foot, anti-war masterpiece F-111 was made up of no less than 51—his canvases soon began to feature not just Rosenquist’s abstractions, but faces like Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy, and motifs like cars, dishware, and groceries. All that made for a distinctive style that helped to shape Pop art in the ’60s, alongside his contemporaries Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein (even winning the approval of the staunchest minimalists, like Donald Judd). In remembrance of the artist, who died on Friday at age 83, take a look back at his work from over the years, featuring everything from spaghetti to lipsticks to Life advertisements, here.