ANTON ROSENBERG, THE HIPSTER IDEAL ARTIST WAS AN ICON OF 1950'S ATMOSPHERE
IN GREENWICH VILLAGE

New York Times NEW YORK -- Anton Rosenberg, a storied sometime-artist and
occasional musician who embodied the Greenwich Village hipster ideal of
1950s cool to such a laid-back degree and with such determined detachment
that he never amounted to much of anything, died 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 20s, 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 aesthetic that shunned enthusiasm, scorned ambition and ridiculed
achievement.

Going underground

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.''

Bohemian origins

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 GI 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 Exotic Plant Co. of Laredo, Texas, peeled off from the San
Remo and congregated in the loft for an all-night peyote party cum jam
session.

Hip -- and often high

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' 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 1960s.

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 and 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.