Edward Joseph Ruscha IV (, roo-SHAY; born December 16, 1937) is an American artist associated with the pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. He is also noted for creating several artist's books. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California.Dana Goodyear (11 April 2011), Ed Ruscha: 'California Postcard: Moving Day' The New Yorker.
Early life and education Ruscha was born into a Roman Catholic family in Omaha, Nebraska, with an older sister, Shelby, and a younger brother, Paul. Edward Ruscha, Sr. was an auditor for Hartford Insurance Company. Ruscha's mother was supportive of her son's early signs of artistic skill and interests. Young Ruscha was attracted to cartooning and would sustain this interest throughout his adolescent years. Though born in Nebraska, Ruscha lived some 15 years in Oklahoma City before moving to Los Angeles in 1956 where he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute (now known as the California Institute of the Arts) under Robert Irwin and Emerson Woelffer from 1956 through 1960. While at Chouinard, Ruscha edited and produced the journal Orb (1959–60) together with Joe Goode, Emerson Woelffer, Stephan von Huene, Jerry McMillan, and others.Streets # * of Los Angeles Archive Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. As a result, Orb became one of the U.S.' first recorded alternative newspapers.Nichols, Chris. "What Was L.A.'s First Alternative Newspaper? You can thank the hippies," Los Angeles Magazine (January 23, 2018).
In 1961, Ruscha spent seven months traveling through Europe.Jason Farago (7 September 2023), The Deadpan Laureate of American Art New York Times. After graduation, Ruscha took a job as a layout artist for the Carson-Roberts advertising agency in Los Angeles.
By the early 1960s he was well known for his paintings, collages, and photographs, and for his association with the Ferus Gallery group, which also included artists Robert Irwin, John Altoon, John McCracken, Larry Bell, Ken Price, and Edward Kienholz. He worked as layout designer for Artforum magazine under the pseudonym "Eddie Russia" from 1965 to 1969 and taught at UCLA as a visiting professor for printing and drawing in 1969. He is also a lifelong friend of guitarist Mason Williams.
Work Ruscha achieved recognition for paintings incorporating words and phrases and for his many photographic books, all influenced by the deadpan irreverence of the Pop Art movement. His textual, flat paintings have been linked with both the Pop Art movement and the Beat Generation.
Early influences While in school in 1957, Ruscha chanced upon then unknown Jasper Johns' Target with Four FacesTarget with Four Faces in the online catalog of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. in the magazine Print and has credited Johns's work as a source of inspiration for his change of interest from graphic arts to painting. He was also impacted by John McLaughlin's paintings, the work of H.C. Westermann, Arthur Dove's 1925 painting Goin' Fishin''', Alvin Lustig's cover illustrations for New Directions Press, and much of Marcel Duchamp's work. In a 1961 tour of Europe, Ruscha came upon more works by Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, R. A. Bertelli's Head of Mussolini, and Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais. Some critics point out the influence of Edward Hopper's Gas (1940) in Ruscha's 1963 oil painting, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas.Wells, Walter, Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper, London/New York: Phaidon, 2007. To the question of influence, Ruscha has said, "Art has to be something that makes you scratch your head."
Southern California
Although Ruscha denies this in interviews, the vernacular of Los Angeles and Southern California landscapes contributes to the themes and styles central to much of Ruscha's paintings, drawings, and books. Examples of this include the publication Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), a book of continuous photographs of a two and one half mile stretch of the 24 mile boulevard.Jaleh Manor 'Ed Ruscha's One-Way Street'. In October, Winter 2005, No. 111, Pages 127-142 (doi:10.1162/0162287053148139) October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology In 1973, following the model of Every Building on the Sunset Strip, he photographed the entire length of Hollywood Boulevard with a motorized camera.THEN & NOW by Ed Ruscha Steidl Publishing, Göttingen. Also, paintings like Standard Station (1966), Large Trademark (1962), and Hollywood (1982) exemplify Ruscha's kinship with the Southern California visual language. Two of these paintings, Standard and Large Trademark were emulated out of car parts in 2008 by Brazilian photographer Vik Muniz as a commentary on Los Angeles and its car culture.
His work is also strongly influenced by the Hollywood film industry: the mountain in his Mountain Series is a play on the Paramount Pictures logo; Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962) depicts the 20th Century Fox logo, while the dimensions of this work are reminiscent of a movie screen; in his painting The End (1991) these two words, which comprised the final shot in all black-and-white films, are surrounded by scratches and streaks reminiscent of damaged celluloid. Also, the proportions of the Hollywood print seems to mimic the Cinemascope screen (however, to make the word "Hollywood", Ruscha transposed the letters of the sign from their actual location on the slope of the Santa Monica Mountains to the crest of the ridge).
Ruscha completed Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights in 1961, one year after graduating from college. Among his first paintings (SU (1958–1960), Sweetwater (1959)) this is the most widely known, and exemplifies Ruscha's interests in popular culture, word depictions, and commercial graphics that would continue to inform his work throughout his career. Large Trademark was quickly followed by Standard Station (1963) and Wonder Bread (1962). In Norm's, La Cienega, on Fire (1964), Burning Gas Station (1965–66), and Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1965–68), Ruscha brought flames into play.Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, May 29 - September 5, 2010 Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In 1966, Ruscha reproduced Standard Station in a silkscreen print using a split-fountain printing technique, introducing a gradation of tone in the background of the print, with variations following in 1969 (Mocha Standard, Cheese Mold Standard with Olive, and Double Standard).Ed Ruscha: Standard Stations, March 1 — March 29, 2008 Honor Fraser, Los Angeles.
In 1985, Ruscha begins a series of "City Lights" paintings, where grids of bright spots on dark grounds suggest aerial views of the city at night.Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, May 29 - September 5, 2010 Moderna Museet, Stockholm. More recently, his "Metro Plots" series chart the various routes that transverse the city of Los Angeles by rendering schematized street maps and blow-ups of its neighborhood sections, such as in Alvarado to Doheny (1998).Ed Ruscha: Metro Plots, January 27 - February 27, 1999 Gagosian Gallery, New York. The paintings are grey and vary in their degrees of light and dark, therefore appearing as they were done by pencil in the stippling technique.Ed Ruscha, BLVD.-AVE.-ST. (2006) Tate, London. A 2003 portfolio of prints called Los Francisco San Angeles shows street intersections from San Francisco and LA juxtaposed one over the other.Rachel Lyon, Ed Ruscha Crown Point Press, San Francisco.
Word paintings As with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, his East Coast counterparts, Ruscha's artistic training was rooted in commercial art. His interest in words and typography ultimately provided the primary subject of his paintings, prints and photographs.Ed Ruscha, Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup (1966) Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena. The very first of Ruscha's word paintings were created as oil paintings on paper in Paris in 1961.Ed Ruscha: Boulangerie, 1961 Christie's New York, Works from the Collection of Michael Crichton, 11–12 May 2010, New York. He began to isolate monosyllables — ACE, BOSS, HONK, OOF — without additional imagery against solid backgrounds.Jason Farago (7 September 2023), The Deadpan Laureate of American Art New York Times.
Since 1964, Ruscha has been experimenting regularly with painting and drawing words and phrases, often oddly comic and satirical sayings alluding to popular culture and life in LA. When asked where he got his inspiration for his paintings, Ruscha responded, "Well, they just occur to me; sometimes people say them and I write down and then I paint them. Sometimes I use a dictionary." From 1966 to 1969, Ruscha painted his "liquid word" paintings: Words such as Adios (1967), Steel (1967–9) and Desire (1969) were written as if with liquid spilled, dribbled or sprayed over a flat monochromatic surface. His gunpowder and graphite drawings (made during a period of self-imposed exile from painting from 1967 to 1970)Ed Ruscha: OOO and Lisp, 1970 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. feature single words depicted in a trompe l'oeil technique, as if the words are formed from ribbons of curling paper. Experimenting with humorous sounds and rhyming word plays, Ruscha made a portfolio of seven mixed-media lithographs with the rhyming words, News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews, Dues, News (1970).Ed Ruscha, News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews, Dues, News (1970) Tate, London.
In the 1970s, Ruscha, with Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, among others, began using entire phrases in their works, thereby making it a distinctive characteristic of the post-Pop Art generation.Ed Ruscha Marlborough Gallery. During the mid-1970s, he made a series of drawings in pastel using pithy phrases against a field of color.Ed Ruscha, I PLEAD INSANITY BECAUSE I'M JUST CRAZY ABOUT THAT LITTLE GIRL (1976) Tate, London. He also congregated with artists including George Condo. In the early 1980s he produced a series of paintings of words over sunsets, night skies and wheat fields. In the photo-realist painting Brave Men Run In My Family (1988), part of the artist's "Dysfuntional Family" series, Ruscha runs the text over the silhouetted image of a great, listing tall ship; the piece was a collaboration with fellow Los Angeles artist Nancy Reese (she did the painting, he the lettering).Ed Ruscha, Brave Men Run In My Family (1988) Christie's, 9 June 1999, Los Angeles. In a series of insidious small abstract paintings from 1994 to 1995, words forming threats are rendered as blank widths of contrasting color like Morse code.Ed Ruscha, November 17, 2012 - January 12, 2013 Gagosian Gallery, New York. Later, words appeared on a photorealist mountain-range series which Ruscha started producing in 1998.Alastair Sooke (February 9, 2008), Ed Ruscha: Painting's maverick man of letters The Daily Telegraph. For these acrylic-on-canvas works, Ruscha pulled his mountain images either from photographs, commercial logos, or from his imagination.Ed Ruscha, Rehab Pump Doctors (1998) Christie's Post-War Contemporary Evening Sale, 8 November 2011, New York.
From 1980, Ruscha started using an all-caps typeface of his own invention named "Boy Scout Utility Modern" in which curved letter forms are squared-off (as in the Hollywood Sign)Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, May 29 - September 5, 2010 Moderna Museet, Stockholm. This simple font is radically different from the style he used in works such as Honk (1962).Ed Ruscha, Crossover Dreams (1991) National Galleries of Scotland and Tate Beginning in the mid-1980s, in many of his paintings black or white 'blanks' or 'censor strips' are included, to suggest where the 'missing' words would have been placed. The 'blanks' would also feature in his series of Silhouette, Cityscapes or 'censored' word works, often made in bleach on canvas, rayon or linen.Ed Ruscha / MATRIX 134, May 1, 1990 - July 7, 1990 Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley.
Surrealism