James Rosenquist - Works from the James Rosenquist Estate New York Thursday, February 15, 2024 | Phillips
  •  “By 1967 the Vietnam War was escalating out of control.”
    —James Rosenquist 
    On the heels of radical social changes taking place in America in the late 1960s, See-Saw, Class Systems exemplifies Rosenquist’s progressive activist activities during the period. While many of Rosenquist’s 1960s compositions reference the Vietnam War more broadly, See-Saw, Class Systems refers to a specific incident related to the war, one which occurred on American soil: the 1968 police riots in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, where police exerted unprecedented levels of violence upon counterculture and anti-war demonstrators, including the artist Claes Oldenburg, who got caught in the shuffle. When Oldenburg subsequently cancelled his Chicago show with Richard Feigen Gallery, the gentle show about pleasure he concluded was “obscene in the present context,”i Feigen decided to instead host a protest show against Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, who was largely seen as responsible for the police actions at the Convention. 

     

    The image of See-Saw, Class Systems was used as the exhibition poster for the show, prominently depicting the scowling face of Mayor Daley. Rearrangements of the words “upper,” “middle,” and “lower” printed at either side of the portrait echo the “new class struggle” evoked in Feigen’s manifesto-slash-proposal for the exhibition: “the week of Aug. 25 exposed the new class struggle. It is no longer the poor class against the rich or Democrat against Republican. It is the educated against the uneducated, the courageous against the terrified, young against old, thinking against nonthinking.”ii The show provided an outlet for politically minded artists like Rosenquist to both engage in art activism and negotiate the role of art and artists in relation to social crisis. 

     

    In 1967, a year before Rosenquist would create See-Saw, Class Systems, the artist painted a large-scale political picture and mounted it to a flatbed truck for a New York anti-war protest parade–the painting was eventually destroyed by people throwing tomatoes and rotten vegetables.iii The Richard J. Daley show and its rhetoric surrounding artist commentary on social crisis thus contained a personal connection for Rosenquist, whose own artwork had been defaced due to its political commentary. 

     

     

    i Letter from Oldenburg to Richard Feigen dated September 5, 1968, cited in Patricia Kelly, “Art and Politics, Chicago-Style: 1968,” in Louise Lincoln, 1968: Art and Politics in Chicago, 2008, p. 15.

    ii Reprinted in D. J. R. Bruckner, “The Art World Answers Chicago’s Mayor Daley,” Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1968, cited ibid, p. 15. 

    iii Jan van der Marck, “Reminiscing on the Gulf of Mexico: A Conversation with James Rosenquist,” American Art vol. 20, no. 3., 2006, pp. 87-88. 

    • Literature

      Constance Glenn 22

209

See-Saw, Class Systems (G. 22)

1968
Lithograph in colors, on Arches paper, the full sheet.
S. 24 x 34 1/4 in. (61 x 87 cm)
Signed, titled, dated and numbered 55/100 in pencil (there was also an unrecorded number of artist's proofs), published by Richard Feigen Graphics, New York (with their blindstamp), framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$500 - 700 

Sold for $2,794

Works from the James Rosenquist Estate

New York Auction 15 February 2024