ROSENQUIST--A NOT-SO-STILL LIFE IN THE U.S.A.

James Rosenquist’s art makes you feel like you’re in a funky little seaside bar chatting with a stranger, a blond guy in a Hawaiian shirt. His forehead is peeling from the sun; he talks a lot but not about himself. He talks about America and all the stuff he loves about this country. He loves Kool-Aid, prefers canned spaghetti to Italian pasta and thinks the tread on a Goodyear tire is better than any abstract art he ever saw.

He gets off on chrome and girls whose lipstick matches their nails and who will not quite go all the way in the back seat of his ’58 Ford. It’s the textures that count--soft tresses, smooth skin, nubbly wool sweater and hard smooth little buttons.

“Boy, I love that feeling. Snap, crackle, slide. I love all that but what it boils down to--or maybe up to--is that everything in this country is so big.

“ Big . Every single thing we have here is taller, wider, deeper, broader and brighter than anything they have over there. In this great land, we have Life Saver candies the size of truck tires and bacon slices you could carpet the hall with if they weren’t so good and greasy.”

The guy laughs. He’s on his third beer but his high about the U.S.A. is beyond the effects of brew. He rhapsodizes over Coke bottles, built-in ovens and the rest of the blue-collar paradisiacal vision like the old Beach Boys lyricizing the Little Deuce Coupe. His voice takes on a reedy edge that sounds like adolescent sarcasm. Is this guy some sort of put-on artist who is trying to sabotage the same dream he seems to celebrate? There is no cracking his boyish, enthusiastic delivery. Psyching this guy out is like trying to write a man’s life story from his grocery lists.

Rosenquist’s billboard-scale art became a fixture of our mental landscape in the Pop Art rebellion of the ‘60s. He was born in Grand Forks, N.D., in 1933 to a family of mixed Scandinavian descent. His name means “rose thorn,” which somehow tells you something about his work. It is on retrospective view at Manhattan’s Whitney Museum through Sept. 26, winding up a tour originated at the Denver Art Museum, whose curator, Dianne Perry Vanderlip, organized the whole omelet.

Rosenquist, one gathers, was a cute, towheaded blue-collar kid of indifferent scholarship but marked artistic talent. Given the yawning spaces of cultural gap in the Midwest, it was perfectly natural that the young man applied his skills to painting outdoor signs and billboards, hanging out with crusty old itinerant craftsmen and sopping up their aesthetic mystique, a sensibility that runs parallel to that of the world of gallery artists except for its anonymity.

Rosenquist had no desire to remain anonymous. He moved to New York, continued studies with professional teachers and eventually shuffled his billboard-painter aesthetic together with an uptown art mentality that made him into a famous Pop artist along with Oldenburg, Warhol, Lichtenstein & Co.

He never quite fit the category. He had neither the mocking archness of the more mannered Pop-eyes nor the obvious technical and intellectual virtuosity of Classic Pop masters like Johns and Rauschenberg. In fact, anyone who ever visited a studio where real painted billboards are executed is liable to wonder what all the fuss was about. Every 8x40-foot billboard painted has virtually all the qualities of a Rosenquist. Images of rosy girls and whiskey bottles are so immense that up close they look like abstract paintings. Viewed at focus distance their size gives them a looming surrealist immensity like Gulliver or the Jolly Green Giant stepping over the horizon line.

Early Rosenquists like “Pushbutton” read like Abstract Expressionist pictures arbitrarily translated into recognizable images. But its various fragments of hand, shoe and car radio only function formally as if they were De Kooning paint slashes defining tense surfaces as abrasive high-speed skids.

You begin to feel this art isn’t about anything but itself. Among the 40-odd large-scale works on view is a fairly straight picture of a bunch of boys lined up in shorts as in a gym class. Their doughy, uniformed look is heightened by generalized execution that dramatizes their wimpy, sweet lack of personality. You start to feel that all of Rosenquist’s art participates in this dopey, pre-adolescent anonymity.

The perception isn’t wrong, it just needs correcting along with an initial feeling that, really, Rosenquist doesn’t paint very well outside the scummy formula conventions of the billboard artist. That’s not wrong either, but finally it dawns on you that those conventions yield the art a special property. His Franco-American spaghetti doesn’t deliver pasta, it gives us its overcooked goopiness. We feel the slickness of butter and the stickiness of honey. Everything is painted to suggest physical sensation, but there is no real texture so nothing has specific gravity. You wind up with a whole series of disembodied sensations that overlap their images through juxtaposition, very often with unsettlingly sexy effect.

The artist was a superstar in the ‘60s and he drank his way through that endless whoopee wearing a paper suit. Then the party was over. Rosenquist’s work sold badly and his wife and child were seriously hurt in an auto accident. Mounting hospital bills forced the artist deep into debt. He retreated to Florida and established a comparatively cheap studio. When his wife finally recovered, they divorced amicably. He found a new lady and things began to pick up again.

Biographical details like this are so liberally larded into Judith Goldman’s very fine catalogue essay that one is tempted to link changes in the work to changes in Rosenquist’s personal life.

No question that such intimate considerations forge the growth of every art, but it’s a mistake to read Rosenquist this way. His use of impersonally public advertising imagery insists on being seen as an articulation of something more general. These are pictures of the Great American Myth, updated from the panoramic landscapes of Church and Bierstadt. They are the dreams of a nice, optimistic guy who buys the whole of blue-collar beatitude that surfs from the youth of the Pepsi Generation to an all-electric kitchen for the missus, from Pampers for the gurgling Gerber’s baby who comes into their life and the Piece of the Rock that makes them safe from all harm.

It is art and not rearranged advertising because it is edged with doubt. The huge room-wrapping painting “F-111” is not overtly the anti-war protest painting it was said to be in the Vietnam era. It could be a nice, bully, give-’em-hell piece of patriotism, except the panel of the little-girl in the bullet-shaped chrome hair dryer wedges open room for irony the way Midwestern politeness can harbor a scorpion-sting of nastiness. “Gee it’s great to see you, ‘specially since you never come around.”

Years pass and the imagery is evermore rich in visual event and evermore suggestive that the domestic romance at the core of the dream is being eaten away by the termites of time. A woman’s eye stares from a broken whiskey glass like the refrain in a blubbery country song about booze and betrayal. In “Slipping Off the Continental Divide,” the stairs in an empty house lead only to a book with nothing printed on the pages.

Then a change comes over the work like the mood of divorced guys who move to seaside marinas. Work becomes hysterically bright with tropical flowers and scalpel-sharp shapes bearing the painted eyes of young women. A lacquer-red nail is sharpened like a pen point to write a guy’s fate in cute, cutting little love-notes.

“Hey man, I know she’s a mean little fox who cheats, but what are you going to do? It’s the only dream I got left.”

Rosenquist raises the tawdry to the status of the epic and we believe him. Batteries of lipsticks stand in position like ICBMs. Finally, there is the symphonic 46-foot-long “Star Thief.” The starry sky is straight out of special-effects-land somewhere between “Dr. Strangelove” and “Star Wars.”

Sure we can give these paintings great social and political significance. But Rosenquist gets down to the values behind it all. A stylish woman’s head lies comatose like a chic Snow White waiting for the prince. A vast ocean of bacon stretches to the horizon so hubby can bring it home so mommy can cook his bacon for him, confirming those signs of power that lurk in the background, the dynamo, the great falls.

The guy in the seaside bar orders a fourth beer.

“I know what it’s about, man. I’ve seen it and it’s dreck. But you know, man, I still love the dream. She’s my Little Deuce Coupe, you don’t know what she’s got.”