James Rosenquist

Castelli Feigen Corcoran, New York

Collection of Ethel Redner Scull, New York

Sotheby's, New York, 10 November 1986, Lot 36

Private Collection, Baltimore

Sotheby's, New York, 3 May 1995, Lot 207

Acquired from the above sale by the present owner 

Clifford S. Ackley, 10 Painters & Sculptors Draw, Boston, 1984

“I’m interested in contemporary vision—the flicker of chrome, reflections, rapid associations, quick flashes of light. Bing-Bang! I don’t do anecdotes. I accumulate experiences.”

- JAMES ROSENQUIST

With striking synergy and complexity, James Rosenquist’s While the Earth Revolves at Night from 1982 demonstrates the tension between the mechanical and the corporeal. This was a common subject of contemplation for Rosenquist, a seminal figure in the Pop Art movement, for he frequently felt that industrial society interfered with the sensual and natural. The present work executed in lush pastel on rich black paper set the precedent for Rosenquist's eponymous painting of the same title—held in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery—one of the artist’s monumental works from the early 1980s which constitute the apex of his period of renewal that occurred at the close of the preceding decade.

The iconographic elements of While the Earth Revolves At Night are presented in clear juxtaposition: intertwined gears against the the candy apple red finger nail dominating the center of the work is in high contrast with the gloved hand within a black-and-white scene on the left. The inclusion of gears is a reference to Rosenquist’s works from the 1960s, which also placed mechanical parts in opposition with fragments of the human body. The striking, shiny red nail at the center of the work reaches a menacing point, an iconography connoting that “[w]oman has become the predatory aggressor: the all-consuming enveloper and beast” (Judith Goldman, James Rosenquist, 1985, p. 60).