Around the mall and beyond. (Smithsonian Resident Associate class called "Discover Graphics") (column)

Around the Mall and beyond Question: How do you display an 86-foot-long painting in a gallery with walls only a little more than 20 feet in length? Answer: You bend it around the corners. But you wouldn't know unless you've seen the extraordinary, almost overwhelming exhibit of James Rosenquist's giant paintings at the National Museum of American Art.

It's his 10-by-86-foot F-111 (which soldfor a resounding Rosenquist record of $2.09 million at a recent Sotheby's auction) that hangs on all four walls of a special room on the third floor. Special room? Everything having to do with Rosenquist's titanis productions has to be special. In the physical size of his individual works, he's the biggest thing that's ever happened to the Museum of American Art. It managed to hang his paintings dramatically by building that F-111 room and clearing the broad area surround it of existing displays. The staff even built a massive wall across some of the columns of the famous Lincoln Gallery--where President Lincoln danced at his 1865 Inaugural ball--to hold Star Thief (above), another Rosenquist giant, 17 feet tall and 46 feet long.

Famous artists may arise from all sortsof unlikely backgrounds. And James Rosenquist, with his strange, slick, disturbing, monstrously huge images of planes, of smiles with white, even teeth and lustrous eyes, of glistening drops of water or Cooke on a cold …