Vol. 2024 No. 1 (2024)
Articles

James Rosenquist’s White Bread: A Hybrid Image of Consumption and Art

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  • Zhuolun Mi
Zhuolun Mi
Department of Art History, The George Washington University, 1918 F Street, Washington DC, 20052, United States.

Published 02-07-2024

Keywords

  • Pop art,
  • James Rosenquist,
  • white bread,
  • Ellsworth Kelly,
  • the 1960s

Copyright (c) 2024 Cambridge Arts and Humanities Research

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

James Rosenquist (1933-2017) was one of the leading figures of the 60s American Pop Art, famous for his handmade paintings composed of bright, colorful and plastic commercial images. However, considering the hundreds of artworks he created, certain works receive less attention than others. Among them is White Bread (1964), an oil painting preserved by the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. The essay argues that the concrete subject matter and latent abstract formal qualities of White Bread resonate with the equivocal relationships between fine arts, business and the public. It demonstrates, if not explicitly expatiates, the infiltrating commercial power’s indelible and ongoing effects on both common people’s daily lives and the operation of the American art world of the 60s.

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