In 1960, the painter Agnes Martin moved out of the studio in Lower Manhattan, New York, where she had worked for the two previous years. Her place was taken by a young man of Swedish descent from North Dakota called James Rosenquist. These were febrile times in American art. Martin had painted small-scale, abstract works of conventual reticence and calm. Rosenquist painted billboards.

Until he moved into 3-5 Coenties Slip – the colour field painter Ellsworth Kelly had the studio upstairs – his acknowledged chef d’oeuvre was the sign for Hebrew National salami on a subway station in Flatbush. His work was also to be seen on billboards above Times Square. “I had to paint good enough to sell,” recalled Rosenquist, who has died aged 83. “That was the first criteria. Never mind the art part. My audition was an 8ft-tall painting of Kirk Douglas’ head for the movie The Viking. I gave him beautiful blond hair, saliva on his lips, tears in his eyes. I got the job.”

Like his studiedly negligent grammar, this story was part of an image as painstakingly constructed as one of his paintings. If Rosenquist did not come from a cultured background, his mother, Ruth, was a keen amateur painter. She and her husband, Louis, an aeroplane mechanic, moved to Minneapolis when James, their only child, was 11; and Ruth encouraged the boy to go to art school. Rosenquist’s memory of this was characteristically downbeat: “My mother would say, ‘Well, you’re always drawing. Maybe you could make some money at it.’ So I answered an ad in the paper from a sign-painting company. I made $1.50 an hour painting Phillips 66 emblems on gas tanks and stuff around North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin.” In fact, at Ruth’s urging, her son had applied for, and won, a scholarship to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1946, when he was only 13.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Star Thief by James Rosenquist at the Guggenheim in Bilbao in 2004. Photograph: Rafa Rivas/AFP/Getty Images

In 1952, he began a two-year course in studio art at the University of Minnesota, from where he won another scholarship, this time to the Art Students League in New York. There he was taught by George Grosz, among others. Previous League alumni included Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. All three would, like Rosenquist, be co-opted under the new banner of pop art.

Like many of his fellows, Rosenquist harboured doubts about the term. “I’ve never cared for [it], but after half a century of being described as a pop artist I’m resigned to it,” he said in his 2009 autobiography, Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art, adding: “I [still] don’t know what pop art means, to tell you the truth.” This was fair enough. As he was at pains to point out, he had begun to incorporate popular imagery into his canvases more or less as soon as he moved into Martin’s studio in 1960, before he had heard of Lichtenstein or the as-yet-uncrowned king of pop, Andy Warhol.

A case in point is the 1961 painting Zone, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A two-part canvas, Zone juxtaposes the zig-zag cut-out of a woman’s face with another of drops of water on a tomato. Both subjects are painted en grisaille, even if Rosenquist would not have used the term. The woman’s well-manicured fingers – probably based on an ad for nail polish – echo the leaves below them, as her eyes do two beads of moisture. Zone is an uncanny work, alive to the jarring possibilities of collage. If its constituent parts are popular, it is a subtle take on a society in which there are just too many images.

The picture impressed the dealer Richard Bellamy enough for him to give Rosenquist his first exhibition, in February 1962. This quickly sold out. It was followed, six months later, by another, New Realists, at the blue-chip gallery of Sidney Janis. By 1964, Rosenquist’s paintings were selling at $1,000 apiece. “You weren’t getting rich,” he recalled, “but I felt very lucky to paint any damn thing I felt like.” That year, he began the work that would seal his reputation and remain, for half a century, by far his most famous – a 25-metre-long, 51-panel canvas that filled all four walls of the Leo Castelli gallery when it was unveiled in April 1965. Predictably, critics foamed at the mouth over F-111, as the work was called; equally predictably, this ensured its success. On the final day of its showing, F-111 was bought by the collector Robert Scull for a rumoured $60,000. (In 1984, it sold at Sotheby’s for $2.1m).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Part of James Rosenquist’s 25-metre, 51-panel painting F-111 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2006. Photograph: Patrick Batchelder/Alamy

As with the term pop art, Rosenquist’s relationship to the work that defined him remained ambiguous. Formally, as in Zone, F-111’s disparate parts echoed one another, the nose-cone of its titular fighter jet balancing a salon hairdryer on a woman’s head, an umbrella a mushroom cloud, and so on. In retrospect, Rosenquist felt that his commentary on what had lately been dubbed the military-industrial complex had been too heavy-handed. F-111 also placed him in a glare of publicity from which he never quite managed to escape.

Plans for a mural, Star Thief, made for Miami International Airport in 1980, were met with equal outrage, with Frank Borman, the ex-astronaut chairman of Eastern Airlines, campaigning bitterly (and successfully) against its installation. The work showed rashers of gammon floating among the Milky Way. “I have been in space,” Borman fumed, “and I can assure you there is no bacon there.”

Back in 1957, when Rosenquist was working in Times Square, a reporter had stopped to speak to him. “I’m an artist!” the young billboard painter enthused. “I paint miniatures!” An article on him duly appeared, with a photograph beside it. From that moment on, the line between Rosenquist as a painter of advertisements and Rosenquist as an advertisement for himself became more and more blurred. This led, in the end, to his work often being taken less seriously than it deserved to be.

In 1960, Rosenquist married Mary Lou Adams, a textile designer; they were divorced in 1975. His second marriage was to Mimi Thompson, in 1987. She and their daughter, Lily, survive him, as does a son, John, from his first marriage.

• James Albert Rosenquist, artist, born 29 November 1933; died 31 March 2017