Anton Rosenberg

New York Times February 22, 1998, Sunday


Anton Rosenberg, a Hipster Ideal, Dies at 71

By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.

Anton Rosenberg, a storied sometime artist and occasional musician who embodied the Greenwich Village hipster ideal of 1950's cool to such a laid-back degree and with such determined detachment that he never amounted to much of anything, died on Feb. 14 at a hospital near his home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 71 and best known as the model for the character Julian Alexander in Jack Kerouac's novel ''The Subterraneans.''

The cause was cancer, his family said.

He was a painter of acknowledged talent, and he played the piano with such finesse that he jammed with Charlie Parker, Zoot Sims and other jazz luminaries of the day.

But if Mr. Rosenberg never made a name for himself in either art or music -- or pushed himself to try -- there was a reason: once he had been viewed in his hipster glory, leaning languidly against a car parked in front of Fugazzi's bar on the Avenue of the Americas, there was simply nothing more he could do to enhance his reputation.

For as Kerouac recognized, Mr. Rosenberg in his 20's, a thin, unshaven, quiet and strange young man of such dark good looks that he was frequently likened to the French actor Gerard Philipe, was the epitome of hip, an extreme esthetic that shunned enthusiasm, scorned ambition and ridiculed achievement.

It was Kerouac's friend Allen Ginsberg who discovered Fugazzi's and its coterie of hipsters of such bedrock cool that he dubbed them the subterraneans, a term Kerouac adopted as the title of his book published in 1958.

Like other Kerouac works, the book, which was written in 1953, is the most thinly disguised of fictions, one whose most striking deception was shifting its locale from New York to San Francisco to protect the publisher from any libel action by the very real Greenwich Village regulars who populated its pages under fictitious names. To Kerouac, they were cynosures of cool.

''They are hip without being slick,'' he wrote. ''They are intelligent without being corny, they are intellectual as hell and know all about Pound without being pretentious or talking too much about it, they are very quiet, they are very Christlike.''

As for Mr. Rosenberg, or Julian Alexander, as he was called, he was ''the angel of the
subterraneans,'' a loving man of compelling gentleness, or as Kerouac put it: ''Julian Alexander certainly is Christlike.''

By the time he made the Greenwich Village scene, Mr. Rosenberg, a native of Brooklyn whose father was a wealthy industrialist, had served a year in the Army, studied briefly at the University of North Carolina and spent a year in Paris, ostensibly studying art on the G.I. Bill but in reality soaking up the Left Bank bohemian atmosphere and haunting the Cafe Flore and the Cafe Deux Magots with James Baldwin, Terry Southern and other incipient icons of American cool.

Back in New York by 1950, Mr. Rosenberg opened a print shop on Christopher Street and plunged into the hip world centered on the San Remo at Bleecker and Macdougal Streets.

He lived for a while in the East 11th Street tenement Ginsberg called Paradise Valley and had such an instinct for future chic that he was one of the first artists to move to an industrial loft in a bleak neighborhood below Canal Street years before it became the fashionable TriBeCa.

In a different life, Mr. Rosenberg might have used the loft to turn out masterpieces. But as an ultimate hipster he had other priorities, which became apparent one famous Halloween night when the crew, alerted to a shipment from the Exotic Plant Company of Laredo, Tex., peeled off from the San Remo and congregated in the loft for an all-night peyote party cum jam session.

Drugs, of course, were more than an accouterment of hip. They were its very essence. And while marijuana, then an exotic drug used only by jazz musicians, was universal among the stoned cool hipsters, it was heroin that set the subterraneans apart.

Mr. Rosenberg, who appears as a character in William Burroughs's book ''Junkie,'' was an addict for most of his adult life, which might help explain why he never made a name for himself in art or music or held a regular job after his print shop failed in the 1960's.

Fortunately, Mr. Rosenberg, whose survivors include his wife, Joan, and a brother, Ross, of Orlando, Fla., had the foresight to marry a schoolteacher so enamored of his charming, creative ways that she cheerfully supported the family while Mr. Rosenberg continued to paint, play music, amuse his friends and family. He also served as a surprisingly effective role model for his three sons: Shaun, a Manhattan restaurateur who owns Orson's on Second Avenue; Matthew, a computer consultant from the Bronx, and Jeremy, of Manhattan, a New York City police detective who specializes in drug enforcement.

To The Editor:

This letter is written concerning the obituary of Anton Rosenberg that appeared in the 2/22/98 "Sunday New York Times." As a long-term friend of Mr. Rosenberg, I found the subject of the obituary to be without resemblance to the person I knew. Even more disappointing than factual inaccuracies was the overbearing, almost snide, attitude with which it was written. Mr. Rosenberg was the most amazingly gentle man, generous in spirit, evincing a play of gentle humor and wit that made him a joy to all who knew him. He was a devoted and loving husband to his wife, Joan, and each of them upheld the other in a completion of true marriage. He was a nurturing father to his three sons, guiding them with love, wisdom and humor - a father who could enter their world and see through their eyes. Anton was an inspired painter and musician - never seeking fame, which he could well have obtained except that he was too wise to court such an ephemeral prize. It was his own integrity, not drugs, that kept him from bartering his artistic freedom for the counterfeit coin of public adulation. Anton moved gracefully through his era. We have been blessed to share it with him. May his compassion ever unfold.

Anne Spitzer
Beacon, New York