The photograph of twenty-five-year-old James Rosenquist standing on a narrow catwalk painting a billboard high above Manhattan’s bustling 47^th Ave. is a pean of appreciation for the earnest, hard-working men of that time. It was taken in 1958, and though it is not likely he imagined that this laborious and dangerous work would be perfect training for achieving the fame of the greatest Pop artists of his time — Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, and Oldenburg — as he blended the flesh tones of an upper arm and added highlights for the muscle and bone structure, he was painting fragmentary portions of the greater picture and perfecting a canny ability to enlarge and resize imagery, working with abstraction on a scale and in a manner unmatched by any artist of his time.

When aligned with his characteristically crisp, bold, painterly handling, formal elements and imagery untethered to norms of context and relationship, the result can have a transformative effect. Television or the Cat’s Cradle Supports Electronic Picture is a powerful illustration of that mélange of abilities as well as an artist’s intentions to generate free associations of thought and contemplation. Here, Rosenquist invites us to explore our free-wheeling associations of three disparate elements set against a cosmic ether: tropical flora (passion flowers), a human presence deconstructed as sharded scissor-cut facial components, and between the two, a rectangular shaped diamond-meshed lattice. But there is also playful irony here. Given Rosenquist’s environmental concerns during the late 1980s and ‘90s, the thin, taut strands of a cat’s cradle suggest the folly of our egocentric bearing. Its points of contact suggest the fundamental connections between everything and serve to belie the notion that humankind has little or no deleterious effect on the world in which we live.