![]() ![]() The cover of Ruscha's artist’s book Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) © 2023 Ed Ruscha. That was where he caught the 1962 debut of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans paintings, an exercise in repeated motifs and mass consumerism that the younger artist soon deployed in self-published books of grainy, black-and-white photographs. (One outlier, a photograph of himself in bed with two women, was his tongue-in-cheek wedding announcement.)įor part of that time, Ruscha’s office was above Ferus Gallery, the first to represent him. During those years, he initiated what became a commissioned feature of the magazine by producing striking ads for his own exhibitions. After studying graphic design at Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) and editing an experimental student magazine called Orb, he worked briefly for a printer and an advertising agency, then became the layout editor for Artforum magazine, a job he held from 1965-69. He had just graduated from high school in Oklahoma City, where he grew up, and drove west to Los Angeles to seek his fortune as a commercial artist. Ruscha first hit that road in 1956, a year before Jack Kerouac published On the Road about the same subject. It is one source of an inescapable sense of nostalgia that attends the show.Ī shadowy portrait of Jumbo the movie elephant is a stunner Like many of Ruscha’s ideas, these paintings derive from road trips on Route 66, the two-lane blacktop celebrated in story and song that interstate highways later made obsolescent. A daytime companion, painted the following year, hangs nearby. The diagonal view also suits Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas (1963), a gorgeous black, red and white painting of a petrol station as one might see it when pulling away from the pump, late at night. The painting also introduces his fondness for stretched diagonals, a recurrent structural element that contributes a sense of movement to a static medium with a brilliant economy of means. Ruscha’s compression of fame, power, hype and time into a single, wide-screen image is characteristic of his ability to send several associations slaloming through the mind at once. The first “scripted” painting to appear in the show, a billboard-size oil from 1962, captures the glamour of a movie premiere in a Klieg-lighted projection of big red letters spelling “20th Century Fox”. With more than 200 works on display, the exhibition adds up to an evolving canon of “likes”-cars, roads, streetscapes, signage, typography, building façades-that Ruscha has mined in a variety of media and materials during his seven decades as an artist.Īn installation view of Now Then, including Ruscha's signature word paintings Oof (1962-63), Actual Size (1962) and Annie (1962) Photo: Jonathan Dorado Examples of each keep the eye ping-ponging around a syncopated, mix-and-match presentation by Christophe Cherix, MoMA’s chief curator of drawings and prints, enlivening a museum where contemporary art often looks like an orphaned child. Ruscha’s droll sense of humour has a salubrious effect on almost any reading of his art, be it painting, drawing, screenprint, book, photograph or magazine advert. One says: “I don’t want no retrospective”. Words are all over the show, appearing solo, as explosions of bold-faced, comic-book sounds ( OOF, UGH) titles ( Annie) puns ( News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews & Dues) brand names ( SPAM) emblems (the Hollywood sign) and fragments of speech. That is the ruling principle of representation in Now Then, the artist’s winner of a career retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). “Everything possesses irony,” Ruscha says. Note that Ruscha (pronounced Roo- shay) prioritises the idea of a picture over the word depicted. He likes “the idea of a word becoming a picture”. ![]() Ed Ruscha, the octogenarian Pop conceptualist from Los Angeles, is more specific. Andy Warhol said that Pop art was about “liking things”.
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