In 1961, legendary Green Gallery director Dick Bellamy and taxi magnate Robert Scull called up to a corner window on Coenties Slip, then part of a ramble of brick factory buildings near New York’s financial district. They had come to see James Rosenquist, a 28-year-old billboard painter from North Dakota. Scull remembered him in the March 1968 edition of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin as a person "ill-at ease…who spoke in a painfully abstract manner." They saw a series of abstract works, and then three new large canvases: "Hey Let’s Go For a Ride," "Zone" and a third painting seductively mixing oversized fragments of a television, a Spam sandwich and a girl’s face. Modeled in clear, bright colors and monochromes, it gave an effect both familiar and decidedly strange. Scull sought an explanation. "Man, this is our new religion—the cathode-ray tube," Rosenquist told him. "The painting is the explanation." Scull bought "The Light that Won’t Fail II" (1961) for $350. Sitting in paint-splattered jeans and T-shirt in his vast aluminum and steel studio on Florida’s Gulf Coast, Rosenquist, 74, now recalls the moment with a laugh: "My first sale!"

Bellamy brought over collectors Emily and Bob Tremaine; they purchased the other two paintings. A year later, Rosenquist opened his first one-man show, at the Green Gallery. "Everything sold," recalls the artist, still somewhat amazed. "I wondered if anyone would come. The bar was on cement blocks and the only thing to drink was rye and water."

Rosenquist, who had come to New York on an Art Students League scholarship in 1955, was renting the former studio of Agnes Martin. Ellsworth Kelly, Ray Johnson, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were neighbors, and Willem de Kooning befriended him at the fabled Cedar Tavern. Rosenquist was, in many ways, situated in the middle of the contemporary art world and primed to contribute something exceptional. He did.

The Museum of Modern Art included Rosenquist in "Americans 1963," and the sign painter descended from the scaffolds over Times Square and launched—along with Johns and Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein—the new realism, Pop Art. "I learned a lot from painting billboards," Rosenquist says. "My job was to take an object—a tomato, a face, Elizabeth Taylor in a bathing suit—and scale it up 15 feet. I always knew I wanted to paint, make a new kind of picture, but I hated advertising." Like Warhol, a commercial artist who employed his skills to exploit the superficial, Rosenquist invented a new language to depict banality.

Turning away from the drip emotional landscapes of Abstract Expressionists like de Kooning, Kline and Pollock, Rosenquist painted a deadpan portrait of a burgeoning America with its sexy vocabulary of movie stars, endless rows of shiny consumables and the somewhat sinister cascade of advertisements promising unbridled prosperity, technology and urban shine. Rosenquist’s images burst through the frame in surreal, jump-cut combinations—a giant comb, a pair of lips, a mushroom cloud, a sprig of cables, a slice of cake. "I Love You With My Ford" (1961) fused a Ford grille, a couple whispering and canned spaghetti—an aesthetic lifted decades later by Jeff Koons and David Salle, among others. Blinding the viewer with their movie-screen scale and the "blink-blink-blink" riff of images clipped from magazines, Rosenquist’s art translated ordinary objects "that the mind already knows," as his friend Jasper Johns noted. In writing about the 2003 Guggenheim retrospective of Rosenquist’s works, critic Jerry Saltz noted that the artist "didn’t paint from life, but from Life magazine."

In 1964 Rosenquist began work on a project of immense proportions that would hypnotize those who doubted this new American art. The "F-111," his 1965 anti-war opus, featured the fuselage of the latest product of the military-industrial complex and stretched 86 feet in 55 panels that wrapped around Leo Castelli’s gallery and, in effect, the American mind. It brought Rosenquist instantaneous global renown. "Here was a plane flying through consumer society," he says. "People offered to buy individual pieces, but in the end, Leo said, ‘We sold the whole thing to Bob Scull.’" (Rosenquist continued to exhibit with Castelli until the dealer’s death in 1999.) The leviathan toured Europe as well as the Jewish Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the eve of the Vietnam conflict, this painting was Rosenquist’s own "Guernica." "F-111" sold for $45,000 and "changed my life," says the artist. (Richard Jacobs, its second owner, sold it to MoMA in 1996 for $5 million.) The F-111 was a centerpiece of the full-blown retrospective along Frank Lloyd Wright’s ramps at the Guggenheim, an exhibition that confirmed Rosenquist’s preeminent place in American art.