TIME PIECES.(James Rosenquist, painting, Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York, New York)

The James Rosenquist retrospective now at the Guggenheim turns Frank Lloyd Wright's helix into a pinball machine. Your ambulatory gaze is the rolling ball. The paintings and the occasional sculpture are lights and bumpers, emitting tacit dings and thoks when struck. Rosenquist--one of the big three masters of American Pop painting, with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein--has always striven, as a matter of earnest principle, to make his works befuddlingly sensational at first sight. The show's installation on Wright's ramp, by the curators Walter Hopps and Sarah Bancroft, amplifies spectacle to a pitch of happy panic. The consequences are mixed. Rosenquist's best work exhibits firm formal command and deft philosophical nuance, rewarding contemplation, and these aspects of the art suffer. One notes them numbly, in passing. Conversely, inferior works--mostly from the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when Rosenquist regularly indulged in overbearing, mere razzmatazz--come off rather better than they deserve. The show's off-ramp, rectilinear galleries provide oases of discrimination. One room contains the artist's masterpiece, "F-111" (1964-65), which has long had my vote as the Great American Painting. Another displays collage studies for that work, which, in a scrappier sort of way, are as prepossessing as Picasso's drawings for "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."

Pinball machines are obsolete, of course, in the manner of dial telephones and leaded gasoline. But obsolescence is a central concern, which proves to be evergreen, of Rosenquist's definitive works of the nineteen-sixties. He culled images of cars, clothes, hair styles, food (a hot dog, canned peaches), and whatnot from magazines several years old--Life, usually--and painted fragments of them in abrupt, enigmatic juxtapositions. Wildly disparate in scale and varied in acrid colors and grisaille, not to mention possible meaning, the images in those works are unified by a mode of brushwork--broadly stroked modulations of white and one other color at a time--that he learned as a professional billboard painter, scaffolded above Times Square. Was importing the method into art a bit of a cheap trick? So were Warhol's photo silk-screening and Lichtenstein's limning of panels from comic strips. The goal in all cases was to fuse painting aesthetics with the semiotics of media-drenched contemporary reality. The naked efficiency of anti-personal artmaking defines classic Pop. It's as if someone were inviting you to inspect the fist with which he simultaneously punches you.

Being slightly out of date--like the circa-1950 car combined with the heads of a loving couple and a snarl of tomato-sauced spaghetti in "I Love You with My Ford" (1961)--estranges Rosenquist's early images in time as billboard technique (calculated to produce illusion only when seen from afar) does in space. In every era, the recent past is a rolling blind spot of culture, occluding things that are too stale for fashion and too fresh for nostalgia. Exploiting the eeriness of such entities is a defining practice of so-called "postmodern" artists, who tend to hold Rosenquist in high regard. Actually, the poetry of recent pastness is as old as self-conscious modernity. Charles Baudelaire noticed it in 1859, as a "ghostly piquancy," apropos of outdated fashion plates. To deem the phenomenon novel is a perennial, honest mistake that attends each generation's awakening sense of itself as unique in history--a sense that is born in shock at the evanescence of what, in childhood, had seemed to be the world's normal state. Rosenquist anatomized the recurrent trauma in his work of the sixties.

A blue-collar, prairie Baudelairean, Rosenquist was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1933 and grew up on the move with his father, who was an airplane mechanic, among other things, and his mother, a sometime pilot who encouraged his interest in art. His art education, at the University of Minnesota and then at New York's Art Students League, coincided with jobs painting gas stations in the Midwest and billboards in New York. In 1956, while struggling to be a credible abstract painter, he fell into a charmed circle of emerging artists that included Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Ellsworth Kelly. In 1960, he rented a studio that had been vacated by Agnes Martin on Coenties Slip, way downtown near the East River piers; Kelly and the painters Robert Indiana and Jack Youngerman worked nearby. He made his first ...