Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting [Hardcover]

James Ellroy (Author), Ralph Rugoff (Author), Alexandra Schwartz (Author), Ed Ruscha (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2010

Transforming words into icons and images into wide-screen epics, Ed Ruscha has wholly reconceived the terms of painting for our era. Tagged variously as a Conceptualist, Pop artist or latter-day Surrealist, Ruscha flouts category, or rather incorporates all categories, always surprising and experimenting with both subject and method. His paintings are steeped in our times: cinema, advertising, logos, late capitalism and the twists and turns of postwar art have all informed his iconography since the early 1960s, arriving on the cool surfaces of his canvases with magnetic detachment. Ruscha eschews process and focuses exclusively on the final product: "the means to the end has always been secondary in my art," he has said. Ruscha has also reinvented the use of words in art, finding disquieting ways to invest language with a weird, throbbing, ambient static, never aspiring to what he calls "word gestures," since "each word is an excursion unto itself." Fifty Years of Painting focuses on Ruscha's majestic oeuvre of paintings. A magnificent publication, it comes housed in a slipcase that sports the artist's classic painting "Standard Station" (1966), and, alongside fantastic reproductions, it contains a preface by novelist James Ellroy, essays by Ralph Rugoff, Alexandra Schwartz and Ulrich Wilmes, a text by novelist Bruce Wagner, an interview with the artist by Kristine McKenna, an illustrated chronology and an exhibition history. Ed Ruscha (born 1937) has made pioneering work in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, bookmaking, photography and film since 1958. Associated in the early 1960s with the Ferus Gallery, Ruscha was included in Walter Hopps' landmark Pop art show New Painting of Common Objects, at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

James Ellroy is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. His novels include 'L.A. Confidential' and 'The Black Dahlia'. Ralph Rugoff is Director of the Hayward Gallery, London. Alexandra Schwartz is the editor of 'Leave Any Information at the Signal' a collection of Ruscha's writings and interviews. She is a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Bruce Wagner is an American writer, actor, producer and director based in Los Angeles. Ulrich Wilmes is Senior Curator at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Kristine McKenna is a Los Angeles-based writer who has written extensively on Wallace Berman and West Coast Beat culture. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers (February 28, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1935202065
• ISBN-13: 978-1935202066
• Product Dimensions: 12.1 x 10 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #132,061 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Definitive Ed Ruscha Retrospective, March 19, 2010

By 

Buffy (Sunnydale) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting (Hardcover)

This is easily the single best book covering the art of Ed Ruscha. It comes in a slipcase which houses the hardcover book. It's a nice, large, horizontal format which perfectly suits Ruscha's original artworks. The paper, color and binding are all first class and you get a great collection of images spanning Ed's fifty year career. This is already on my list of the 10 best art books for 2010. Highly recommended.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Small-size Ruscha, April 6, 2010

By 

Claude Reich (Florianopolis, Brazil and Paris, France) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting (Hardcover)

This book is the catalogue for a traveling Ruscha retrospective (London, Munich and Stockholm)that will run until september 2010.

The introductory essays are of a very high quality and explain the meaning of the works in depth , while avoiding any pedantic cant. The text tackles the importance of signs, of words, of objects, in Ruscha's art and stresses the fact that he completely renewed the idea of landscape painting by producing a body of works that is at the same time abstract and figurative (being inspired in so doing by the early Jasper Johns of the Flags and Targets). The last essay is actually an interview of the artist, which took place in 2007, and in which he sheds new light on his work (especially when he declares that his main source of inspiration was indeed Jasper Johns and not Magritte as was initially believed).

Now, I am slightly disappointed with the reproductions of the works: the book coming in a horizontal and rather small format, the result is a series of smallish illustrations which completely kill the size effect and the color nuances that you always feel when you face a Ruscha painting. The large early work "BOSS", for example, looks uniformally brownish when in reality it is made of various tones of brown and thick impastos. A larger format and better quality plates are really missing here. In my opinion, this book does not come close to Richard Marshall's authoritative 2003 monograph published by Phaidon and still available. Therefore, only 3 stars.