“Meteors make you think about what’s significant, and what has consequences and what doesn’t during your brief t.mes on earth”
The Meteor Hits Monet’s Garden is part of a quartet of meteor paintings that James Rosenquist worked on between 1996 and 1999, alongside The Meteor Hits Picasso’s Bed, The Meteor Hits Brancusi’s Pillow, and The Meteor Hits the Swimmer’s Pillow. The American artist began his career in the 1950s with billboard painting, which was instrumental to his stylistic development. Smoothly painted, vibrantly coloured, large-scale images of consumer items, movie stars, and random elements of popular culture became the subject of his paintings.
By the late 1990s, Rosenquist, standing amongst the most respected figures within the American arts scene, began to reflect on his own status and importance within the history of art. The ‘Meteor’ series was born out of a childhood memory of the artist, as he recalled: “In 1938, when I was a kid, I was living in western Minnesota, and, twelve miles north of me, a great big fat lady was lying in bed one night when a meteor as big as a baseball came crashing through her roof, hit her on the hip, and went through the floor. It didn’t kill her, but it gave her a giant bruise…So I thought about that, and I thought about a meteor as a natural disaster that shoots in from space like an exclamation point” (James Rosenequist cited in: Walter Hopps, ‘James Rosenquist’, Grand Street, No. 71, Spring 2003, p. 45).
“Brancusi’s studio is a more somber place. Endless columns rising from its floor like death markers, and the anthropomorphic wooden king looms larger than life… Monet’s studio was his garden pond, where he conducted experiments in light and color, and here, amongst the dark interior rooms of Brancusi and Picasso, it is an oasis, hushed, tranquil and opulent. But the meteor will soon explode”
PHOTO © BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
In this series, the artist reflects on his own place alongside the masters of the past, in this case Claude Monet. The scene is rendered in large scale, almost double the size of the Impressionist master’s Waterlily Pond series from which the basic composition is reprised. This series had been a source of inspiration for Rosenquist, as he explored the idea of peripheral vision when he created his room-scaled paintings, including his acclaimed F-111 (1965-66). In the present work, the American artist imagines the fall of a meteor in the midst of Monet’s garden. What attracted Rosenquist to this subject was its being an “inexplicable event” (Ibid.). The scene is imbued with suspense as the viewer is unable to predict the trajectory that the meteor will follow, as well as its impact. Its bright, warm pink-red tonality is juxtaposed to the delicate nuances of the French artist’s garden, which ranges from forest greens, to powder blues, to touches of liliac. The effect created is one of cheerful adversity: in the beauty of this natural phenomenon, lies the awareness of its potentially devastating consequences on Earth.
Shifting from Rosenquist earlier exploration of consumer culture, The Meteor Hits Monet’s Garden, alongside the other three paintings from the series, is a sensational embodiment of the artist’s realisation of his own place within the history of art and specifically among his historical predecessors, abruptly and magnificently disrupting the Western canons.