"Art," by Robert Cottingham, 1992. (National Museum of American Art)

For most of his 40-year career as a photo-realist painter and master printmaker, Cottingham has devoted brush, engraver's burin and lithographer's crayon exclusively to recording America's fast-disappearing urban storefront signs. In a hard-edge, precisionist style, he's immortalized everything from glitzy theater marquees to ordinary handmade signs hawking hot dogs, Lucky Strikes and beer. There are also, among the 70 prints and one painting in this show, the blinking neon "Orph," part of a movie marquee that was the subject of his first color lithograph in 1972. And a red-and-gold Woolworth's 5-and-10-cent store sign (just enough of it to recognize). And a neon champagne glass that brims with illuminated fizz.

Such signs today are increasingly laden with nostalgia, disappearing as they are from the urban landscape. Nostalgia, however, was far from their meaning or intent back in the '70s, when Cottingham was first (and last) seen in these parts at Fendrick Gallery in Georgetown.

Back then, Cottingham's images were hot stuff, part of a hip new movement that combined '60s "pop" objects and attitudes with the new '70s photo-realism – i.e., popular images born of photographic slides projected onto canvas and thereby reproduced. Photo-realist paintings were meant to be blank-faced, rendered like billboards, without a trace of the artist's touch. Looking back over this show, it now seems that Cottingham was never really either a pop artist or a photo-realist at heart. Rather, he seems more like an American scene painter whose goals and stint in advertising collided happily with a new visual language tailor-made to suit his interests.

Those interests were longstanding. From age 12, when he saw an Edward Hopper painting of urban storefronts, silent and unpeopled, at the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn-born Cottingham knew he wanted to be a painter – a realist painter and one who dealt, as did Hopper, with the American scene. When he finished art school in the '60s, the time was just right: American "scene" painting had been reduced to the depiction of "pop" objects (like Campbell's soup cans), and photo-realists were choosing up iconic aspects of urban clutter to specialize in – like cars and storefronts, diners and gas stations.

By then the use of signs in abstract art was anything but new. From early in the century, artists like Charles Demuth, Stuart Davis, Gerald Murphy and, later, Robert Indiana had made paintings that incorporated the strong graphic qualities of signs and words. Photographers from Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott to Lee Friedlander and Bill Christenberry had also become fascinated with signs as a distinctive aspect of the 20th-century American landscape that was big, bold and everywhere. Cottingham, with Hopper in mind, seems to have stumbled onto signs-as-subject because that's what he saw as he painted the view from his apartment windows in New York and Los Angeles.

But even in the '70s, Cottingham appears to have been after something beyond deadpan reproduction. Whether the nostalgia was intended or not we'll never know. But there was often an element of wonder in these message-laden marvels of design and inventiveness. Consider "Art," one of his most resonant images. We are brought up close, at an angle, to see this segment of an art theater marquee, and how much effort had been lavished upon it. Deep shadow-box letters, now filled with bent tubes of colored neon, were once surrounded by ordinary light bulbs. And the sockets still show. Cottingham also used the word "Art" here to transform the mere picture of a sign into an emblematic work that alludes to the marquee status of art itself. (Cottingham only recently returned to this image, originally designed in the '70s, to create a lithographic print.)

But it is the hands-on dimension, the sense of the artist's touch, that is the biggest and most agreeable surprise in this show. And we see it here in some hand-colored prints, as well as in the wonderful black-and-white "Champagne" lithograph, which has no color and no words. There is also an extensive set of variations on the same Hopperesque storefront theme, titled "Barrera-Rosa's," in which we see a virtuoso display of mastery in several graphic media. True: Cottingham starts with photographs. But he also makes drawings to work out shapes, colors and patterns before arriving at his final composition. Sometimes he even changes words: a Central Liquor sign, for instance, was changed from "Liquor" to "Tip Top." Don't ask me why.

The point is that there is a good deal more to Cottingham's work than many of us might have thought, based upon those trendy shows of his work back in the '70s.

Today, at 63, Cottingham is still at it. Except that after a quarter-century of painting signs, he's switched to railroad cars, mostly bold graphic images of boxcars. At first he focused on logos, such as the circle and cross of the Santa Fe Railroad. More recently he's abandoned letters altogether for the hooks and latches and other mysterious paraphernalia attached to the rear ends of freight cars. Or, in the most recent work, titled "Portals," for the mysteries of their dark, open maws.

Nearly all of the works in this exhibition have been recently acquired, by gift of the artist, for the museum's permanent collection. Cottingham's paintings, watercolors and drawings dating from the 1970s to the present will be on view at Pensler Galleries, 2029 Q St. NW, from Nov. 7 to Dec. 5.

Eyeing America: Robert Cottingham Prints will continue at the National Museum of American Art through Jan. 31. The NMAA is located in the Old Patent Office Building at Eighth and G streets NW, above the Gallery Place Metro station. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily. Admission is free. For further information call 202-357-2700.