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 Faces 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. 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. In 1973, following the model of
Every Building on the Sunset Strip, he photographed the entire length of
Hollywood Boulevard with a motorized camera. 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. 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''). 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. 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). 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. A 2003 portfolio of prints called
Los Francisco San Angeles shows street intersections from San Francisco and LA juxtaposed one over the other.
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. The very first of Ruscha's word paintings were created as oil paintings on paper in Paris in 1961. He began to isolate monosyllables — ACE, BOSS, HONK, OOF — without additional imagery against solid backgrounds. 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) 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). 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. During the mid-1970s, he made a series of drawings in pastel using pithy phrases against a field of color. 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). 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. Later, words appeared on a photorealist mountain-range series which Ruscha started producing in 1998. For these acrylic-on-canvas works, Ruscha pulled his mountain images either from photographs, commercial logos, or from his imagination. 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) This simple font is radically different from the style he used in works such as
Honk (1962). 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.
Surrealism Paintings like ''Angry Because It's Plaster, Not Milk
(1965) and Strange Catch for a Fresh Water Fish'' (1965) are exemplary works from Ruscha's group of paintings from the mid-1960s that take the strict idea of literal representation into the realm of the absurd. This body of work is characterized by what the artist termed "bouncing objects, floating things," such as a radically oversized red bird and glass hovering in front of a simple background in the work and have a strong affinity to
Surrealism, a recurring theme in the artist's career. The fish plays a prominent role throughout the series and appears in nearly half of the paintings. Another frequent element is Ruscha's continuous depiction of a graphite pencil – broken, splintered, melted, transformed.
Odd media In his drawings, prints, and paintings throughout the 1970s, Ruscha experimented with a range of materials including
gunpowder,
vinyl,
blood, red wine,
fruit and
vegetable juices,
axle grease, chocolate syrup, tomato paste, bolognese sauce, cherry pie, coffee, caviar, daffodils, tulips, raw eggs and
grass stains.
Stains, an editioned portfolio of 75 stained sheets of paper produced and published by Ruscha in 1969, bears the traces of a variety of materials and fluids. In the portfolio of screenprints
News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews, Dues (1970), produced at Editions Alecto, London, rhyming words appear in Gothic typeface, printed in edible substances such as pie fillings, bolognese sauce, caviar, and chocolate syrup. Ruscha has also produced his word paintings with food products on
moiré and
silks, since they were more stain-absorbent; paintings like
A Blvd. Called Sunset (1975) were executed in blackberry juice on moiré. However, these most vibrant and varied organic colorings usually dried to a range of muted greys, mustards and browns. His portfolio
Insects (1972) consists of six screen prints – three on paper, three on paper-backed wood veneer, each showing a lifelike swarm of a different meticulously detailed species. For the April 1972 cover of
ARTnews, he composed an
Arcimboldo-like photograph that spelled out the magazine's title in a salad of squashed foods. Ruscha's
Fruit Metrecal Hollywood (1971) is an example of the artist's use of unusual materials, this
silkscreen of the
"Hollywood" sign is rendered in apricot and grape jam and the diet drink
Metrecal on paper.
Motifs in light Notably different from many of Ruscha's works of the same period, most obviously in its exclusion of text, his series of
Miracle pastel drawings from in the mid-1970s show bright beams of light burst forth from skies with dark clouds. An overall glow is created by the black pastel not being completely opaque, allowing the paper to shine through. In the 1980s, a more subtle motif began to appear, again in a series of drawings, some incorporating dried vegetable pigments: a mysterious patch of light cast by an unseen window that serves as background for phrases such as
WONDER SICKNESS (1984) and
99% DEVIL, 1% ANGEL (1983). By the 1990s, Ruscha was creating larger paintings of light projected into empty rooms, some with ironic titles such as
An Exhibition of Gasoline Powered Engines (1993).
Commissioned works Ruscha's first major public commissions include a monumental mural at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1966) and a seventy-panel, 360-degree work for the Great Hall of
Denver Public Library in Colorado (1995). Created as part of a public-art commission,
The Back of Hollywood (1976–77) was made from a large sheet of sateen on a billboard and situated opposite the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, designed to be read in the rear-view mirror of a moving car. In 1985 Ruscha was commissioned to design a series of fifty murals,
WORDS WITHOUT THOUGHTS NEVER TO HEAVEN GO (a quotation from
Hamlet), for the rotunda of
Miami–Dade Public Library (now the Miami Art Museum) in Florida, designed by architects
Philip Johnson and John Burgee. In 1989, Ruscha decorated a pool for his brother Paul at his house in
Studio City, Los Angeles, with a supersized luggage label: on a black tiled background are the words Name, Address and Phone, complete with dotted lines. In 1998, Ruscha was commissioned to produce a nearly thirty-foot high vertical painting entitled
PICTURE WITHOUT WORDS, for the lobby of the Harold M. Williams Auditorium of the
Getty Center. He produced another site-specific piece, three 13-by-23-foot panels proclaiming
Words In Their Best Order, for the offices of
Gannett Company publishers in Tysons Corner, Virginia, in 2002. The artist was later asked by the
M. H. de Young Memorial Museum to create two large-scale paintings that flank his
A Particular Kind of Heaven (1983), which is in the museum's collection, to form a spectacular, monumental triptych. For his first public commission in New York in 2014, Ruscha created the hand-painted mural
Honey, I Twisted Through More Damn Traffic Today for a temporary installation at the
High Line. In 2008, Ruscha was among four text-based artists that were invited by the
Whitechapel Gallery to write scripts to be performed by leading actors; Ruscha's contribution was
Public Notice (2007). To celebrate the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)'s 75th anniversary, Ruscha was one of the artists invited to collaborate with the museum on a limited-edition of artist-designed T-shirts. Ruscha is regularly commissioned with works for private persons, among them
James Frey (
Public Stoning, 2007),
Lauren Hutton (
Boy Meets Girl, 1987), and
Stella McCartney (
Stella, 2001). In 1987, collector
Frederick Weisman had Ruscha paint the exterior of his private plane, a
Lockheed JetStar. The summer 2012 campaign of L.A.-based fashion label
Band of Outsiders featured
Polaroid shots of Ruscha. In 2020, Ruscha produced the cover art and typography of
Paul McCartney's album
McCartney III. In 2022, he teamed up with
(RED) and
Gagosian Gallery to create a limited-edition silk twill scarf—featuring his drawing
Science Is Truth Found (1986)—to help provide more equitable access to
COVID-19 relief. In 2023 he created the cover art for
the Beatles single "
Now and Then."
Books Between 1962 and 1978, Ruscha produced sixteen small artist's books: •
Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963 •
Various Small Fires, 1964 •
Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965 •
Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966 •
Thirtyfour Parking Lots, 1967 •
Royal Road Test, 1967 (with
Mason Williams and Patrick Blackwell) •
Business Cards, 1968 (with
Billy Al Bengston) •
Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, 1968 •
Crackers, 1969 (with
Mason Williams) •
Real Estate Opportunities, 1970 •
Babycakes with Weights, 1970 •
A Few Palm Trees, 1971 •
Records, 1971 •
Dutch Details, 1971 •
Colored People, 1972 •
Hard Light, 1978 (with
Lawrence Weiner) Later book projects include: •
Country Cityscapes, 2001 •
ME and THE, 2002 •
Ed Ruscha and Photography, 2004 (with Sylvia Wolf) •
OH / NO, 2008 •
Dirty Baby, 2010 (with
Nels Cline and
David Breskin) In 1968, Ruscha created the cover design for the catalogue accompanying a
Billy Al Bengston exhibition at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For the "
Documenta 5" catalogue in 1972, he designed an orange vinyl cover, featuring a "5" made up of scurrying black ants. In 1978, he designed the catalogue "Stella Since 1970" for the
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Leave Any Information at the Signal, a volume of Ruscha's writings, was published by
MIT Press in 2002. In 2010,
Gagosian Gallery and
Steidl published Ruscha's version of
Jack Kerouac's novel
On the Road in an edition of 350. Ruscha's artist books have proved to be deeply influential, beginning with
Bruce Nauman's
Burning Small Fires (1968), for which Nauman burned Ruscha's
Various Small Fires and Milk (1964) and photographed the process. More than forty years later, photographer
Charles Johnstone relocated Ruscha's
Twentysix Gasoline Stations in Cuba, producing the portfolio
Twentysix Havana Gasoline Stations (2008). A recent homage is
One Swimming Pool (2013) by Dutch artist
Elisabeth Tonnard, who re-photographed one of the photographs from Ruscha's
Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968) and enlarged it to the size of a small swimming pool, consisting of 3164 pages the same size as the pages in Ruscha's original book. The pages of this 'pool on a shelf' can be detached to create the life-size installation.
Photography Photography has played a crucial role throughout Ruscha's career, beginning with images he made during a trip to Europe with his mother and brother in 1961, and most memorably as the imagery for more than a dozen books that present precisely what their titles describe. His photographs are straightforward, even deadpan, in their depiction of subjects that are not generally thought of as having aesthetic qualities. His "Products" pictures, for example, feature boxes of Sunmaid raisins and Oxydol detergent and a can of Sherwin Williams turpentine in relatively formal still lifes. Mostly devoid of human presence, these photographs emphasize the essential form of the structure and its placement within the built environment. Ruscha's photographic editions are most often based on his conceptual art-books of same or similar name. Ruscha re-worked the negatives of six of the images from his book
Every Building on Sunset Strip. The artist then cut and painted directly on the negatives, resulting in photographs that have the appearance of a faded black-and-white film. The
Tropical Fish series (1974–75) represents the first instance where the photographic image has been directly used in his graphic work, where Ruscha had
Gemini G.E.L.'s house photographer Malcolm Lubliner make photographs of a range of common domestic objects.
Films and documentaries In the 1970s, Ruscha also made a series of largely unknown short movies, such as
Premium (1971) and
Miracle (1975). With the assistance of a
Guggenheim Fellowship, Ruscha arranged in
Premium a scenario which he first projected in his photo-book
Crackers from 1969 and subsequently transformed into a film which features
Larry Bell, Leon Bing,
Rudi Gernreich, and
Tommy Smothers.
Miracle contains the essence of the artist's same-named painting, inasmuch as the story is told of a strange day in the life of an auto mechanic, who is magically transformed as he rebuilds the carburetor on a 1965
Ford Mustang. The movie features Jim Ganzer and
Michelle Phillips. In 1984, he accepted a small role in the film
Choose Me directed by his friend
Alan Rudolph, and in 2010, he starred in
Doug Aitken's film
Sleepwalkers. Artist
Tom Sachs' 2018 short film
Paradox Bullets stars Ruscha in the role of a hiker lost in the desert and guided only by the voice of
Werner Herzog. Ruscha was featured in
Michael Blackwood's film documentary
American Art in the Sixties. He appeared in
L.A. Suggested by the Art of Edward Ruscha, a 1981 documentary by
Gary Conklin shot at the artist's studio and desert home. Interviews with Ruscha are included in the documentaries
Dennis Hopper: The Decisive Moments (2002),
Sketches of Frank Gehry (2005),
The Cool School (2008),
Iconoclasts (2008), and
How to Make a Book with Steidl (2010), among others. ==Exhibitions==