Not really a "diary me" event, this was prompted by the excellent article by Calvin Tompkins, the long time art critic of The New Yorker about the painter Ed Ruscha (pronounced rew-SHAY) in the July 1 issue of the magazine. Alas, it's behind a paywall now even for us Kindle subscribers. Here's another painter based in Los Angeles you should know about, and I haven't done a diary for you that was about art since my first diary ever for Top Comments. Almost a year ago (8/9/12 - and yes, Ed Tracey, that's why I appropriated one of your Thursdays). Yes, it HAS been an eventful 12 months, has it not? And, lucky you, I had to do some research on this so this is original material!
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So, meet Edward Joseph Ruscha IV:
The deal is, Ruscha shouldn't be unknown at all, especially given his inclusion in
TIME's 100 most influential people in 2013. Chances are, you'll recognize his work from this 1962 painting from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art even if you've never seen it before.
From the
website of his current art dealer:
Born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, Edward Ruscha moved to Oklahoma City in 1941 and to Los Angeles in 1956 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. He had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. At the start of the seventies, Ruscha began showing his work with the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. He currently shows with the Gagosian Gallery in New York, Beverly Hills and London.
Painter AND photographer, with lots of retrospectives and lots of honors. Subject matter? Los Angeles, roadscapes and words. One of the pioneers of Pop Art, in fact, as you can see from this (
Black and Pink Ball, 1972) image, which is the single image featured
at his Catalogue Raisonné website:
Ruscha is also connected, as you can see in the bio above, with two of the mileposts of Los Angeles art history. First, we have Chouinard, where Stanton MacDonald-Wright,
who we read about last August, nurtured a generation or two of artists. Second, there's the Ferus Gallery,
which from 1957 to 1966
helped to nurture the talents of such artists as Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Wallace Berman and Ed Kienholz. The gallery, which was located on La Cienega Boulevard, served as a hub for the city's nascent postwar art scene.
Yes, Los Angeles does have a fairly rich art history, and this is where I wish I had taken an art history course at some point in my life, although I think Ruscha's work really does a lot of speaking for itself, and the places his art lives on the internet have a lot of good commentary as well. Thus, in roughly chronological order, some of the major paintings.
Standard Station and
Hollywood are linked to blogposts about them at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Website:
Standard Station, 1966,
Museum Acquisition Fund, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This is based on his first series of photographs, collected in a groundbreaking photographic book,
Twenty-six Gasoline Stations, in 1963.
Ruscha explains:
"When I grew up I just knew that photographers were ... nerds or they were pornographers, there was no real redeeming social value to somebody who has a camera and takes pictures. But then as I started seriously working as an artist, travelling was essential, so I was continually driving back on US66 between here and Oklahoma, when I would take all these gasoline stations"
Lots of meta in art, but this clearly links Pop to late 19th and early 20th century realism and let's face it, the reaction to abstract expressionism had to be pretty dramatic to put it to bed.
This one is just fun:
Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup, 1966, Oil on canvas, 55 x 59 in., Norton Simon Museum, Gift of the Men's Committee.
In case you don't remember, that's precisely the type face the comic strip Little Orphan Annie used, and the representation of maple syrup can't be anything but a comment on the comic strip itself.
Ruscha created and published a number of photography books, and the most eccentric or spectacular of them was Every Building on the Sunset Strip, the product of a project in which he
mounted a camera to the back of a pick-up truck, photographed every building on the street, on both sides, and pasted the resulting photographs together, one side above, the other below, with building numbers indicated beneath each image.
Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966. Self-published book, offset lithograph, 1966 (second printing 1971). 7 1/8 x 5 3/4 x 3/8 in. Open unfolded: 7 1/8 x 297 in. The Getty Research Institute. Two 25-foot long pages, accordion-folded. Remarkable effort.
According to abebooks.com, you can buy a good copy of this today but it will cost you upwards of $2,000.
Hollywood, 1968,
Museum Acquisition Fund, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
His most, I suppose, notorious painting is based on a photograph as well.
The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965–68, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
As William Poundstone at artinfo.com explains,
The Getty’s new trove of Ed Ruscha photographs includes this study for Ruscha’s 1968 painting Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (below, and currently on view at the Getty Center in “Crosscurrents”). That painting is enigmatic for reasons beyond the obvious calamity. The then-new museum sits in a toxic green haze, with no indication of the surrounding cityscape. I’ve always connected that to the pre-Photoshop fictionalizing of architectural renderings, in which new or proposed buildings would be shown with the urban context stripped out: the gated-community ideal. Critics have often interpreted Ruscha’s painting as a comment on the isolation of museums from the general culture.
On the other hand, maybe I'm okay NOT having studied art history. Enigmatic? The painting is saying LOOK AT ME!
His later work is very much in keeping with what we've seen already: language, Los Angeles, representation. I've restricted myself to paintings to keep this manageable.
O.K., 1988, acrylic on canvas, 20 1/4 x 24 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Edith S. and Arthur J. Levin
Sin / Without, 1990, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 70 x 138 in., Purchased with funds provided by the Modern and Contemporary Art Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Asphalt Jungle, 1991, Acrylic on canvas, 82 x 104 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Santa Monica, Melrose, Beverly, La Brea, Fairfax, 1998, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 112 in.. Purchased with funds provided by Paul and Dorothy Toeppen, Alice and Nahum Lainer, Betty and Brack Duker, Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., Susan and David Gersh, Elyse and Stanley Grinstein, Terri and Michael Smooke, and others, through the 1999 Collectors Committee and the Modern and Contemporary Art Council, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
I'd like to go back to OOF for my conclusion. Calvin Tompkins writes in the teaser of the article the New Yorker provides
If you need cheering up, go to the Museum of Modern Art and look at a painting called “Oof,” by Edward Ruscha. The title and the subject are identical, just those three block letters, each one bigger than your head, in cadmium yellow on a background of cobalt blue. The six-foot-square canvas currently hangs in Gallery 19, on the fourth floor, along with Roy Lichtenstein’s “Girl with Ball,” Andy Warhol’s “Gold Marilyn Monroe” and “Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times,” and other Pop Art trailblazers of the early nineteen-sixties. “Oof” outdoes them all in its immediate, antic impact. This is not the kind of picture that reveals hidden depths on subsequent viewings. Everything is right there, every time, and it never fails to make me feel good.
So why isn't Ruscha the household word that Lichtenstein (we know about Andy and what we know transcends all the art) is ? Easy. LOS ANGELES. Just like Stanton Macdonald-Wright, only less so because, well, improved technology and transcontinental travel. Yes, La-La-Land has a vibrant art scene and has had one for decades. Deal with it.
And now for the stuff that makes this Top Comments: