The sublime and the ridiculous. Americana and art history. Ephemera and high culture. Tom Wesselmann wanted them all.

Two new shows bookending his career offer an opportunity to assess whether the artist, who died in December 2004, achieved his desired synthesis. His early, iconic contributions to 1960s Pop Art are on view at L&M Arts, while Robert Miller Gallery is showing what turned out to be his aptly titled last series, the “Sunset Nudes.”

From the outset, Wesselmann was the most unabashedly sexual of the canonical Pop Artists. He emerged at the same moment as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Jim Dine. Most Pop Art played upon the sex in commercial design to some degree, sending up the crass basic instincts of advertising. For Wesselmann, however, the equation always seemed weighted in the opposite direction: The female nude was placed center stage, and the pop items surrounding her took erotic charge from her proximity. In other words, he was not so much revealing the eroticism of a Coke bottle as the fizzy delight of a nude.

Like Warhol, who started out as a fashion illustrator,Wesselmann’s background was in commercial art. He studied cartooning, and imported the sensibility and techniques associated with it when he turned to fine art. There is no small degree of affront entailed in applying mass-culture techniques – cool, dispassionate, billboard-like rendering – to something as venerable and Old Masterly as the odalisque.

These two exhibitions offer new insight into Wesselmann’s relationship with tradition. Seeing nudes lifted directly from Matisse and dropped into 1960s interiors with all the modern conveniences, or seeing mass-produced American foodstuffs placed on par with the bounty of traditional still-life painting, makes it seem as if he was intent on denigration – a nihilistic leveling of unique beauty and ubiquitous crap. But the sumptuous, serene decoration of his coolly crafted late works makes the opposite seem possible: that he saw himself on an art-historical continuum, speaking the timeless language of the nude with an American accent.

“Sunset Nude With Matisse Odalisque” (2003) at Robert Miller almost seems a manifesto statement about succession. Wesselmann’s sleek, reductive blonde sits in front of a Matisse, itself transcribed in his flat, cartoonish hand; it’s as if they were passengers in a vehicle conveying them through art history. Wesselmann may have come off as poking fun at Matisse in his early appropriations of his nudes, but the tenacity with which he parodied and emulated the French master right up to his last works has to be taken at surface value as a genuine homage.

The irony of Wesselmann’s blatant sexuality is that it opens up his images to multiple readings and competing values. His equation of lust and commodity could earn him praise as a proto-feminist – or castigation as an abject sexist. Like his white-bread still-life motifs, his all-American beauties are presented non-judgmentally, devoid of personal investment or political critique.

His nudes are so extreme in their availability that they parody any sense of actual arousal. Yet in their cool, slick rendering, they are actually kinkier than they would be if dispatched with passion. “Great American Nude #92” (1967) typifies the collision of literalism and metaphor in so much of Wesselmann’s work. (His titles are also heavy with attitude, as numbering implies production-line values.)

A blonde is splayed on her back, lying on a leopard blanket (collaged from actual fabric) with oranges and flowers on a side table. Her raised, naked, bent right leg is caught in a flattened profile. Her left leg, in contrast, protrudes toward the viewer, clad in a black stocking. It is anatomically credible, and rendered volumetrically. Her pudenda, like the bedspread, are made from actual, wire material. The crotch and breasts are highlighted in Wesselmann’s trademark bikini-tan marks, while the cropped head is eyeless with an open mouth and exposed tongue. The figure is highly stylized, graphically reductive, and invested with all the cliches of sexual availability.

Wesselmann’s humorous play of literalism against representation can approach the zany. “Still Life #25” (1963) is a tour de force of flat rendering of volumentric things and relief rendering of flat things. The loaf of white bread, slices falling into the viewer’s space, is a painted sculptural object, while the knobs on the range and the oven mitt are real.

In these early works,Wesselmann loves to appropriate actual, functioning devices and machines. His depiction of a train compartment, “Interior #2” (1964), includes a working fan, a clock, a bottle of 7-Up, metal window frames and screws, and painterly renderings of a curtain and seat. The photographic cityscape seen through the window occupies an intermediary state. A similar semiotics comes across, ingenuously, in “Bedroom Painting #8” (1967-68), which brings an erect female nipple and an or ange, with its nipple, into Sistine Chapellike connectivity.

Even as art history took over from consumer technology as Wesselmann’s principal source, he never really lost his machine aesthetic.The skill and scale of late Wesselmanns are prodigious. Robert Miller is filled with complicated, interlocking sculptural reliefs; humongous, smoothly dispatched paintings; and dexterous cutouts in aluminum. These all make the gallery seem like an auto showroom. It is impossible to believe that so canny an artist as Wesselmann didn’t realize the aesthetic alienation of his own industry, how the output of his studio was as mouthwateringly vacuous as the capitalism he had taken on in his youth.

“Sixties” until April 15 (45 E. 78th Street at Madison Avenue, 212-861-0020). Prices: $150,000-$2 million. “Sunset Nudes” until April 22 (524 W. 26th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-366-4774). Prices: up to $2 million.