Customer Reviews

Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.