THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING FRANK; MANY SIDES OF A SCRAPPY ARTISTIC ICON.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

Frank O'Hara, the quintessential chain-smoking, pub-crawling New York street bard, was a popular subject for his many artist friends. He would pose for them clothed or naked, semi-formal or relaxed, in Spanish Harlem, Greenwich Village, or wherever else art was being made in the restless Manhattan of the 1950s.

So, it's not surprising to be greeted by two large, tellingly dissimilar portraits of O'Hara as you enter the exhibition ``In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American Art'' at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art.

To the left hangs Larry Rivers' massive 1954 canvas depicting a butch, almost pugnacious-looking O'Hara, buck naked but for his leather combat boots. Rivers' rich, romantic brushwork heightens the portrait's full-frontal acknowledgment of the poet's homosexuality. It also underscores the scrappy nature of the postwar New York art world, pumped-up and ready to take on all comers.

To the right of this exuberant image, Elaine de Kooning's 1962 portrait splinters O'Hara into pale abstract brush strokes, as if the nuances of his protean personality couldn't be contained in a single image. De Kooning even rubbed out O'Hara's bluntly handsome face, deciding ``it was more Frank than when the face was there.''

As de Kooning's comment partially suggests, the warm, receptive countenance O'Hara turned toward friends and colleagues was framed by the mask that, as a gay man, he was sometimes obliged to wear. Living in the pre-Stonewall era, and prominently employed by the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara couldn't always express his sexuality with the absolute freedom he craved in his art. Yet his charm and talent afforded him a relatively privileged existence.

``It was quite untypical for a gay man in '50s America to have such a supportive environment,'' says MOCA organizing curator Russell Ferguson. ``I don't mean to imply that it was some kind of golden age. It wasn't. But he thrived in that environment.''

In assembling MOCA's show, Ferguson aimed to ``preserve O'Hara's singularity'' rather than reducing his unique impact to a set of art-historical issues. He also sought to de-mythologize '50s New York as a place where artists were forced to chose between either the macho bravado of abstract expressionism or the bratty irreverence of pop art. In reality, Ferguson says, these communities often overlapped. O'Hara became their prismatic center.

In his catalog essay, Ferguson notes that O'Hara embraced ``an explicitly multiple identity.'' In the poem that gives the show its title, O'Hara imagined himself variously as ``a Hittite in love with a horse,'' ``an African prince,'' ``a Chinaman,'' ``a girl walking downstairs in a red-pleated dress with heels,'' and ``a baboon eating a banana.''

He could be brash or self-effacing, campy or tough, elegantly subtle or crudely sophomoric. Like many American men of his generation, O'Hara had served in the armed forces. He admired the ``moral seriousness'' of Robert Motherwell's monumental elegy paintings to the Spanish Republic. But in his own cartoon-collage collaborations with Joe Brainard, he excavated meaning from the ephemera of pop culture.

``O'Hara was never camp in the sense that he took nothing seriously,'' Ferguson says. ``But he had this ironic quality.''

Erudite, yet put off by scholarly name-dropping, O'Hara distanced his work from the elitism of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. He regarded Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane and William Carlos Williams as the only American poets ``better than the movies.'' Intellectually promiscuous, he was as likely to be found at Stanley Kubrick's ``Dr. Strangelove'' as at a Balanchine ballet or a John Cage concert. One of his prettiest poems, ``The Day Lady Died,'' eulogizes Billie Holiday, ``leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT/while she whispered a song along the keyboard/...and everyone and I stopped breathing.''

His life, friends said, took the shape of a skittish run-on sentence. Words burbled out of him in a jazzy stream-of-consciousness. As his friend and fellow poet John Ashbery once wrote, O'Hara regarded a poem as ``the chronicle of the creative act that produces it.'' For O'Hara, art flowed from the spontaneous passion, the momentary effusion, the daily bump and grind of his beautiful, gritty Manhattan.

Like his contemporary James Dean, O'Hara was cut down in his prime, with his considerable sexual and creative energies still intact. For that and other reasons, he remains today a figure as compelling as the epithet that crowns his final resting place: ``Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.''

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Photo: (1--2) ``In Memory of My Feelings'' includes ``Frank O'Hara No. 2'' (1960), left, and ``Have You Seen Dr. Strangelove Yet?'' (1964).