(b Grand Forks, ND, Nov 29, 1933). American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. While still at school in 1948 he won a scholarship to study at the Minneapolis School of Art, and from 1952 to 1955 he studied painting at the University of Minnesota. In 1955 he moved to New York to study at the Art Students League on a scholarship. He earned his living as a billboard painter from 1957, and in 1960 he began to apply similar techniques of grossly enlarged and fragmented images to huge paintings such as President Elect (oil on masonite, 2.13 × 3.66 m, 1960–61; Paris, Pompidou), in which the glamorous face of John F. Kennedy is combined with the side of a 1950s car and a hand holding a piece of cake painted in grey as if it were a black-and-white photograph. Rosenquist’s debt to Surrealism in his reliance on seemingly irrational juxtapositions was evident in the majority of his paintings, for example in ...