text:
The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Foxey Lady (Miami Pop 1968)
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You know you're a cute little heartbreaker
You know you're a sweet little lovemaker
I wanna take you home
I won't do you no harm, no
You've got to be all mine, all mine
Ooh, foxy lady
I see you, heh, on down on the scene
You make me wanna get up and uh scream
Ah, baby listen now
I've made up my mind yeah
I'm tired of wasting all my precious time
You've got to be all mine, all mine
Foxy lady
The Jimi Hendrix Experience performing Foxey Lady (Miami Pop 1968). (C) 2013 Experience Hendrix L.L.C., under exclusive license to Sony Music Entertainment
Jimi Hendrix 'Voodoo Child' (Slight Return)
"Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" on the Electric Ladyland, album.the third and final album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The song is known for its wah-wah-heavy guitar work. It is #101 on Rolling Stone's list of 500 greatest songs of all time.[1]
The Jimi Hendrix Experience – All Along The Watchtower (Official Audio)
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'Bleeding Heart' – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COsVg…
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All along the watchtower
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and went
Barefoot servants too
Outside in the cold distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl, hey
All along the watchtower
All along the watchtower
Music video by The Jimi Hendrix Experience performing All Along The Watchtower. (C) 2009 Experience Hendrix L.L.C., underexclusive license to Sony Music Entertainment
Forty years ago this week, more than 400,000 concertgoers gathered on the muddy grounds of a 600-acre dairy farm in upstate New York to celebrate what was billed as "three days of peace and music." The Woodstock Music & Art Fair transformed the way we think about popular music and youth culture. In fact, it became an emblem of the counterculture movement of the 1960s.
The past week has been filled with observances of the music festival's anniversary, an "acid trip" down memory lane for many baby boomers. And next week the celebration continues with the release of Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, a cinematic tribute to that legendary gathering.
In a turbulent era that found the nation reeling from its involvement in the Vietnam War — a period that was just a year removed from the shocking assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy — Woodstock represented the power of unbridled hope, freedom, and youthful exuberance. Of course, it also represented that great American trinity of "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll" — with newly embraced freedom also came the collateral damage of hedonistic living.
Out of all the acts that performed during Woodstock — artists like Janis Joplin, The Who, Santana, and Joan Baez — arguably none has become more identified with the event than Jimi Hendrix, whose two-hour set actually took place on August 18, after the music festival was officially over. Rain and technical snafus had pushed his performance to early that Monday morning. With only an estimated 80,000 people remaining to witness it, Hendrix delivered one of his most stirring performances.
If anyone could make his guitar weep, it was Jimi Hendrix. He made it sing — in ecstasy and sadness. He made sounds that had never been heard before. It's no wonder that, in 2003, Rolling Stone ranked him as number one on its list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time."
Hendrix, who was a lefty, taught himself to play a Fender Stratocaster upside down, so that his right-handed guitar could be played left-handed. He experimented tirelessly with amplified feedback and unorthodox chord structures, while incorporating blues, jazz, funk, and his own electrified brand of psychedelic rock into a sound that has influenced virtually every rock guitarist since (not to mention urban funk and pop artists such as George Clinton and Prince).
Hendrix achieved worldwide fame following his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Two years later, he headlined Woodstock, where he played his enduring version of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Through his blistering, sonic barrage, you could actually hear "the bombs bursting in air" and see "the rockets red glare." And, with it being the era of Vietnam, he even threw in a few notes of "Taps" to keep things interesting.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Purple Haze (Music Video)
Music video of Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix (The Jimi Hendrix Experience)
Jimi hendrix – Sgt Peppers
Paul McCartney tells the story about Jimi Hendrix Toronto, August 9, 2010 Unique Video
Camera Valeriy Orlov
Paul McCartney tells a funny story about Jimi Hendrix, how he played Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in London, back in 1967.
This is the only video on YouTube!
Also watch this:
Jimi Hendrix Documentary –
Night Bird Flying � Jimi Hendrix
By Michael Dalton
If anyone could make his guitar weep, it was Jimi Hendrix. He gave voice to it, making it sing�in ecstasy and in sadness. He wrung it for never heard before sounds. It�s no wonder that in 2003, Rolling Stone named Hendrix as number one on the list: The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.
He was self-taught and played a Fender Stratocaster guitar turned upside down (so that the right-handed guitar could be played left-handed). He used it to pioneer a sound that incorporated amplified feedback.
He inspired many imitators. Robin Trower is the closest thing that I have heard to him, but he could not match the nuance of Jimi�s touch. This was graphically depicted in the U2 video �Window in the Skies,� when it shows electricity emanating from Hendrix�s guitar�such was the magic of his sound.
Hendrix achieved worldwide fame following his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Two years later, he headlined Woodstock, which included a version of the �Star Spangled Banner.� You could hear �the bombs bursting in air� and see �the rockets red glare.� Sadly, he died in 1970 at age 27 from an apparent overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol.
One of my favorite songs is �Night Bird Flying� from The Cry of Love. Released on March 6, 1971, this was the second recording released after his death. The first song on the album is fittingly called �Freedom.� Hendrix yearned to be free. All the wealth and pleasures that his fame brought were not enough to satisfy his soul. He was crying out for love and freedom.
This heart-cry comes through songs like �Night Bird Flying� that have a touch of melancholy. It�s as if guitar, voice, words and music unite in longing for that inexpressible something more.
She�s just a night bird flyin� through the night
Fly on
She�s just a night bird making a midnight, midnight flight
Sail on, sail on
A bird flying through the skies is a beautiful picture of freedom. In this instance Hendrix may be using the imagery to express a one-night love affair. All they have is �one precious night.� He longs for her to carry him home. He wants to fully know her. You can hear the longing.
It�s as if Jimi wants this night bird to rescue him. There�s a real temptation to look to a romantic relationship to do that for us. That�s not to discount the real comfort of intimacy with another person. It�s just that we were also designed for a relationship with God, which is far more enduring and satisfying. Being in a relationship with God has the added advantage of creating the potential for more meaningful and rewarding interactions with others.
When we are not rightly related to God, or not as close to Him as we should be, longing and a sense of alienation become more intense. That�s when we are most likely to search for someone or something to fill the void. As Augustine has said it, �Thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.�
This song gave voice to my own sense of alienation and longing when it first came out. I remember flying back with my family from a trip that we had taken in Hawaii. Just before we left I had a falling-out of some kind with a younger brother. It grieved me. As I sat in that plane by myself, flying back through the dark of night, I thought of �Night Bird Flying.� How I yearned for a better day? Would it ever come? Few things are as troubling as the feeling that you are at odds with someone. I was increasingly become estranged from the rest of my family, and it was my choice.
I still remembering the telling photograph that was taken on one of the Hawaiian Islands. My whole family was arrayed in Hawaiian shirts while I leaned away from them in my T-shirt that displayed cannabis and a water pipe on the back and boldly proclaimed �Smoke It.� In contrast to the scowl on my face, my siblings smiled in a way that showed they still had an innocence that would be lost when they eventually followed me into using drugs.
Though getting high brought temporary relief, I was a troubled soul. It was no less so as I sat on the plane and felt the loneliness of separation. Listening to the Hendrix song in my mind made me want to soar like some mythical Night Bird. In the midst of trouble, the Psalmist David longed for wings that he might take flight and find relief in some place of refuge. �Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest; yes, I would wander far away; I would lodge in the wilderness; I would hurry to find a shelter from the raging wind and tempest� (Psalm 55:6-8 ESV).
To have Max Lucado explain it, I was hearing the song of a nocturnal bird that is more often heard than seen. This night bird sings in the dark.
�There dwells inside you, deep within, a tiny whippoorwill. Listen. You will hear him sing. His aria mourns the dusk. His solo signals the dawn.
�It is the song of the whippoorwill.
�He will not be silent until the sun is seen. We forget he is there, so easy is he to ignore. Other animals of the heart are larger, noisier, more demanding, more imposing. But none is so constant.
�Other creatures of the soul are more quickly fed. More simply satisfied. We feed the lion who growls for power. We stroke the tiger who demands affection. We bridle the stallion who bucks control.
�But what do we do with the whippoorwill who yearns for eternity?
�For that is his song. That is his task. Out of the gray he sings a golden song. Perched in time he chirps a timeless verse. Peering through pain�s shroud, he sees a painless place. Of that place he sings.
�And though we try to ignore him, we cannot. He is us, and his song is ours. Our heart song won�t be silenced until we see the dawn.
� �God has planted eternity in the hearts of men� (Ecclesiastes 3:10 TLB), says the wise man. But it doesn�t take a wise person to know that people long for more than earth. When we see pain, we yearn. When we see hunger, we question why. Senseless deaths. Endless tears, needless loss. Where do they come from? Where will they lead? Isn�t there more to life than death?
�And so sings the whippoorwill.�
Jimi heard its song. He yearned so strongly that his own instrument became an expression of his desire. The sorrow of not finding the freedom that he sought seeps into his music.
After speaking of God�s judgement that would come upon the nation of Moab�an enemy of Israel�Isaiah, one of Israel�s prophets, writes, �Therefore my heart intones like a harp for Moab and my inward feelings for Kir-hareseth� (Isaiah 16:11 NASB). Isaiah mourned the destruction of Moab because he had the heart of God towards its people.
God desires that all people would live according to his ways, but when people consistently rebel against Him and refuse to change their ways, judgement becomes his necessary work. Rather than rejoicing over their destruction, Isaiah was filled with grief. His heart mirrored that of Jesus when the latter wept over the waywardness of the people of Jerusalem. Isaiah cried for those who didn�t know God.
In the April 2007 issue of Christianity Today, John Fisher states that author and philosopher Francis Schaeffer�s most crucial legacy was tears. He writes, �Schaeffer never meant for Christians to take a combative stance in society without first experiencing empathy for the human predicament that brought us to this place.� Schaeffer advocated understanding and empathizing with non-Christians instead of taking issue with them. He believed that �instead of shaking our heads at a depressing, dark, abstract work of art, the true Christian reaction should to weep over the lost person who created it.� Fisher concludes his article by saying, �The same things that made Francis Schaeffer cry is his day should make us cry in ours.�
In his book, A Sacred Sorrow, Michael Card reminds us that the Bible is full of lament�people, including Jesus, giving voice to the sorrow and anguish that fills their hearts. It�s a means of staying connected to God when the world is not as it should be. It�s the mourning that Jesus commends.
This is my lament for Jimi.
You were among the greatest of your generation.
You achieved heights that few know.
Through your guitar,
You sang and wept,
You laughed and mourned,
You danced and lamented.
You kissed the sky in song, but your wings were broken�you could not fly.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
My soul aches for Jimi.
It weeps as for a brother and friend.
In his book HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Francis Schaeffer noted:
This emphasis on hallucinogenic drugs brought with it many rock groups–for example, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix. Most of their work was from 1965-1958. The Beatles'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) also fits here. This disc is a total unity, not just an isolated series of individual songs, and for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. As a whole, this music was the vehicle to carry the drug culture and the mentality which went with it across frontiers which were almost impassible by other means of communication.
Here is a good review of the episode 016 HSWTL The Age of Non-Reason of HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?, December 23, 2007:
Together with the advent of the "drug Age" was the increased interest in the West in the religious experience of Hinduism and Buddhism. Schaeffer tells us that: "This grasping for a nonrational meaning to life and values is the central reason that these Eastern religions are so popular in the West today." Drugs and Eastern religions came like a flood into the Western world. They became the way that people chose to find meaning and values in life. By themselves or together, drugs and Eastern religion became the way that people searched inside themselves for ultimate truth.
Along with drugs and Eastern religions there has been a remarkable increase "of the occult appearing as an upper-story hope." As modern man searches for answers it "many moderns would rather have demons than be left with the idea that everything in the universe is only one big machine." For many people having the "occult in the upper story of nonreason in the hope of having meaning" is better than leaving the upper story of nonreason empty. For them horror or the macabre are more acceptable than the idea that they are just a machine.
Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:
The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don't give an answer simply because that isn't what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there.
Instead of making a leap into the area of nonreason the better choice would be to investigate the claims that the Bible is a historically accurate book and that God created the universe and reached out to humankind with the Bible. Below is a piece of that evidence given by Francis Schaeffer concerning the accuracy of the Bible.
TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?, under footnotes #97 and #98)
A common assumption among liberal scholars is that because the Gospels are theologically motivated writings–which they are–they cannot also be historically accurate. In other words, because Luke, say (when he wrote the Book of Luke and the Book of Acts), was convinced of the deity of Christ, this influenced his work to the point where it ceased to be reliable as a historical account. The assumption that a writing cannot be both historical and theological is false.
The experience of the famous classical archaeologist Sir William Ramsay illustrates this well. When he began his pioneer work of exploration in Asia Minor, he accepted the view then current among the Tubingen scholars of his day that the Book of Acts was written long after the events in Paul's life and was therefore historically inaccurate. However, his travels and discoveries increasingly forced upon his mind a totally different picture, and he became convinced that Acts was minutely accurate in many details which could be checked.
What is even more interesting is the way "liberal" modern scholars today deal with Ramsay's discoveries and others like them. In the NEW TESTAMENT : THE HISTORY OF THE INVESTIGATION OF ITS PROBLEMS, the German scholar Werner G. Kummel made no reference at all to Ramsay. This provoked a protest from British and American scholars, whereupon in a subsequent edition Kummel responded. His response was revealing. He made it clear that it was his deliberate intention to leave Ramsay out of his work, since "Ramsay's apologetic analysis of archaeology [in other words, relating it to the New Testament in a positive way] signified no methodologically essential advance for New Testament research." This is a quite amazing assertion. Statements like these reveal the philosophic assumptions involved in much liberal scholarship.
A modern classical scholar, A.N.Sherwin-White, says about the Book of Acts: "For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming…Any attempt to reject its basic historicity, even in matters of detail, must not appear absurd. Roman historians have long taken this for granted."
When we consider the pages of the New Testament, therefore, we must remember what it is we are looking at. The New Testament writers themselves make abundantly clear that they are giving an account of objectively true events.
(Under footnote #98)
Acts is a fairly full account of Paul's journeys, starting in Pisidian Antioch and ending in Rome itself. The record is quite evidently that of an eyewitness of the events, in part at least. Throughout, however, it is the report of a meticulous historian. The narrative in the Book of Acts takes us back behind the missionary journeys to Paul's famous conversion on the Damascus Road, and back further through the Day of Pentecost to the time when Jesus finally left His disciples and ascended to be with the Father.
But we must understand that the story begins earlier still, for Acts is quite explicitly the second part of a continuous narrative by the same author, Luke, which reaches back to the birth of Jesus.
Luke 2:1-7 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
2 Now in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all [a]the inhabited earth. 2 [b]This was the first census taken while[c]Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3 And everyone was on his way to register for the census, each to his own city. 4 Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, 5 in order to register along with Mary, who was engaged to him, and was with child. 6 While they were there, the days were completed for her to give birth. 7 And she gave birth to her firstborn son; and she wrapped Him in cloths, and laid Him in a [d]manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
In the opening sentences of his Gospel, Luke states his reason for writing:
Luke 1:1-4 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
1 Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things[a]accomplished among us, 2 just as they were handed down to us by those whofrom the beginning [b]were eyewitnesses and [c]servants of the [d]word, 3 it seemed fitting for me as well, having [e]investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellentTheophilus; 4 so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been [f]taught.
In Luke and Acts, therefore, we have something which purports to be an adequate history, something which Theophilus (or anyone) can rely on as its pages are read. This is not the language of "myths and fables," and archaeological discoveries serve only to confirm this.
For example, it is now known that Luke's references to the titles of officials encountered along the way are uniformly accurate. This was no mean achievement in those days, for they varied from place to place and from time to time in the same place. They were proconsuls in Corinth and Cyprus, asiarchs at Ephesus, politarches at Thessalonica, and protos or "first man" in Malta. Back in Palestine, Luke was careful to give Herod Antipas the correct title of tetrarch of Galilee. And so one. The details are precise.
The mention of Pontius Pilate as Roman governor of Judea has been confirmed recently by an inscription discovered at Caesarea, which was the Roman capital of that part of the Roman Empire. Although Pilate's existence has been well known for the past 2000 years by those who have read the Bible, now his governorship has been clearly attested outside the Bible.
Top Ten Biblical Discoveries in Archaeology – #6 Pontius Pilate Inscription
This post is a continuation of our Top Ten Biblical Discoveries in Archaeology series. To see the complete series please click here.
Pilate's Role
Who is Jesus? You and I are sitting down in the Credo House, enjoying a delicious Luther Latte. We're talking about the important questions of life and I lean forward asking you that simple question, "Who is Jesus?" What do you think about him? Is He everything the Bible communicates? Did He actually live, die for the sins of humanity, and rise from the dead? Do you consider Him your Lord? Is He the ultimate King of the Jews? Is He the King of Kings? These are important questions for all of mankind to consider.
One man, according to the Bible, was uniquely called upon to wrestle with the identity of Jesus. His name: Pontius Pilate. Pilate was the Prefect (governor) of the Roman province of Judea from 26-36 AD. The Jewish high priests at the time were unable to legally sentence a man to death. Most of the leading Jews wanted Jesus killed. In order for Jesus to be killed the death sentence had to be carried out under Roman law. The Jewish leaders needed Pontius Pilate to condemn Jesus to death. Early one morning a mob drives Jesus to Pilate. Pilate becomes responsible for deciding the fate of Jesus.
John 18 describes the scene:
So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, "Are you the King of the Jews?" Jesus answered, "Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?" Pilate answered, "Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?" Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world." Then Pilate said to him, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world – to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice." Pilate said to him, "What is truth?" (John 18:33-38)
Wow, what an amazing dialogue. Jesus forces Pilate to wrestle with his identity. Where does the conversation go from here? Pilate tells the crowd he believes Jesus to be innocent. The crowd finds a loop-hole in the system asking for a criminal, Barabbas, to be released from prison and for Jesus to be found guilty. Pilate appeases the crowd by sending Jesus away to be flogged. After experiencing the horror of flogging, the Bible tells us Jesus is sent back to Pilate. Pilate and Jesus have another conversation described in John 19:
He entered his headquarters again and said to Jesus, "Where are you from?" But Jesus gave him no answer. So Pilate said to him, "You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?" Jesus answered him, "You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin." (John 19:9-11)
Jesus speaks with determined clarity. Pilate continues to move in the direction of releasing Jesus. Those seeking the death of Jesus cry out to Pilate, "If you release this man, you are not Caesar's friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar. (John 19:12)" Pilate eventually gives in and agrees to have Jesus crucified. Interestingly, the Bible explains, Pilate places on sign of the cross of Jesus which read, "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews."
Pilate Outside the Bible
What we know about Pontius Pilate comes primarily from the Bible. Three men named Tacitus, Josephus and Philo all lived around the time of Jesus and mention Pilate in their writings.
Tacitus writes:
To dispel the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits, and treated with the most extreme punishments, some people, popularly known as Christians, whose disgraceful activities were notorious. The originator of that name, Christus, had been executed when Tiberius was emperor, by order of the procurator Pontius Pilatus. But the deadly cult, though checked for a time, was now breaking out again not only in Judea, the birthplace of this evil, but even throughout Rome, where all the nasty and disgusting ideas from all over the world pour in and find a ready following.
Josephus writes:
About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, for he was a performer of wonderful deeds, a teacher of such men as are happy to accept the truth. He won over many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. When Pilate, at the suggestion of the leading men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him at the first did not forsake him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day.
Philo, more than the other men, speaks to the character of Pilate. He explains Pilate as, "a man of inflexible, stubborn and cruel disposition." Philo explains several situations where Pilate provokes and is cruel to the Jewish people. The Bible and these three men speak plainly about Pilate, the world of Pontius Pilate, and the man from Nazareth whom He sentenced to be crucified. Pontius Pilate is seen by Tacitus, Philo and Josephus as the real governor of Judea and the real man who sentenced Jesus to be crucified.
In 1961 the archaeological world was taken back to the first century Roman province of Judea. A group of archaeologists, led by Dr. Antonio Frova were excavating an ancient Roman theater near Caesarea Maritima. Caesarea was a leading city in the first century located on the Mediterranean Sea. A limestone block was found there with a surprising inscription. The inscription, on three lines, reads:
The inscription is believed to be part of a larger inscription dedicating a temple in Caesarea to the emperor Tiberius. The inscription clearly states, "Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea." The inscription is significant on several levels.
It makes sense for Pilate to be dedicating a temple in Caesarea Maritima. The prefect usually lived in Caesarea and only went to Jerusalem for special purposes. An inscription of Pilate found in Caesarea fits with the first century world described in the Bible.
The dating of the inscription, in connection with its mention of Tiberius (42 BC-37AD) places the governor Pontius Pilate at the same place and time as the Bible's information about Jesus.
As with the Caiaphas Ossuary mentioned in a previous post, the vast significance of the Pilate Inscription is attached to the significance of the crucifixion of Jesus. The inscription does not prove the conversations between Pilate and Jesus. The inscription does not prove Pilate condemned Jesus to be crucified. The inscription does not prove the forgiveness of mankind's sin through the death of Christ. The inscription does, however, support the historical reliability of the cross, as with the Caiaphas Ossuary, by supporting the existence of one of its central characters.
What do you think? Do you find the Pilate Inscription to be a significant discovery in archaeology? Join the conversation by commenting on the post. In the next post we look again at crucifixion from a completely different perspective.
Archaeology Verifies the Bible as God's Word
Sir William Ramsay
Defends the New Testament
Chapter 2
Sir William Ramsay, an atheist and the son of atheists, tried to disprove the Bible. He was a wealthy person who had graduated from the prestigious University of Oxford. Like Albright, Ramsay studied under the famous liberal German historical school in the mid-nineteenth century. Esteemed for its scholarship, this school also taught that the New Testament was not a historical document. As an anti-Semitic move, this would totally eradicate the Nation of Israel from history.
With this premise, Ramsay devoted his whole life to archaeology and determined that he would disprove the Bible.
He set out for the Holy Land and decided to disprove the book of Acts. After 25 or more years (he had released book after book during this time), he was incredibly impressed by the accuracy of Luke in his writings finally declaring that 'Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy' . . . 'this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians' . . . 'Luke's history is unsurpassed in respect of its trustworthiness.'
Luke's accuracy is demonstrated by the fact that he names key historical figures in the correct time sequence as well as correct titles to government officials in various areas: Thessalonica, politarchs; Ephesus, temple wardens; Cyprus, proconsul; and Malta, the first man of the island. The two books, the Gospel of Luke and book of Acts, that Luke has authored remain accurate documents of history. Ramsay stated, "This author [Luke] should be placed along with the very greatest of historians."
Finally, in one of his books Ramsay shocked the entire intellectual world by declaring himself to be a Christian. Numerous other archaeologists have had similar experiences. Having set out to show the Bible false, they themselves have been proven false and, as a consequence, have accepted Christ as Lord.
In an outstanding academic career, Ramsay was honored with doctorates from nine universities and eventually knighted for his contributions to modern scholarship. Several of his works on New Testament history are considered classics. When confronted with the evidence of years of travel and study, Sir William Ramsay learned what many others before him and since have been forced to acknowledge: When we objectively examine the evidence for the Bible's accuracy and veracity, the only conclusion we can reach is that the Bible is true.
Later Archaeologists Confirm Ramsay
|New Testament
|Higher Criticism
|Archaeology Verifies the Bible
|Luke 3:1
In Luke's announcement of Jesus' public ministry (Luke 3:1), he mentions,"Lysanius tetrarch of Abilene."
|Scholars questioned Luke's credibility since the only Lysanius known for centuries was a ruler of Chalcis who ruled from 40-36 B.C.
|However, an inscription dating to be in the time of Tiberius, who ruled from 14-37 A.D., was found recording a temple dedication which namesLysanius as the "tetrarch of Abila" near Damascus. This matches well with Luke's account.
|Acts 18:12-17
In Acts 18:12-17, Paul was brought before Gallio, the proconsul of Achaea.
|At Delphi an inscription of a letter from Emperor Claudius was discovered. In it he states, "Lucius Junios Gallio, my friend, and the proconsul of Achaia . . ."
Historians date the inscription to 52 A.D., which corresponds to the time of the apostle's stay in 51.
|Acts 19:22 and
Romans 16:23In Acts 19:22 and Romans 16:23, Erastus, a coworker of Paul, is named the Corinthian city treasurer.
|Archaeologists excavating a Corinthian theatre in 1928 discovered an inscription. It reads,"Erastus in return for his aedilship laid the pavement at his own expense."
The pavement was laid in 50 A.D. The designation of treasurer describes the work of a Corinthian aedile.
|Acts 28:7
In Acts 28:7, Luke gives Plubius, the chief man on the island of Malta, the title, "first man of the island."
|Scholars questioned this strange title and deemed it unhistorical.
|Inscriptions have recently been discovered on the island that indeed givesPlubius the title of "first man."
In all, Luke names thirty-two countries, fifty-four cities, and nine islands without error.
Featured artist is Edward Ruscha
Ed Ruscha: Buildings and Words
Ed Ruscha: Buildings and Words is a short-length documentary, commissioned by MOCA, about Ruscha's extraordinary body of work. The film is written and directed by Felipe Lima and narrated by Owen Wilson.
Director and Writer: Felipe Lima
Produced by: Ways & Means
Executive Producers: Lana Kim, Jett Steiger
Producer: Rachel Nederveld
Narrated by: Owen Wilson
Ed Begley, Jr.
Larry Bell
Billy Al Bengston
Irving Blum
Larry Gagosian
Jim Ganzer
Joe Goode
Kim Gordon
Ed Moses
Ed Ruscha
Edward Ruscha
|Edward Ruscha
|Edward Joseph Ruscha IV
December 16, 1937
Omaha, Nebraska, United States
|Chouinard Art Institute
|Known for
|Painting, photography, printmaking, film, book art
|Notable work
|Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1961)
Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966)
Standard Station (1966)
|Pop art
|Danna Ruscha (née Knego)
|Guggenheim Fellowship (1971)
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. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California.[1]
Early life and education[edit]
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.[2] Ruscha spent much of the summer of 1961 traveling through Europe. 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.
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.[3]
Early influences[edit]
While in school in 1957, Ruscha chanced upon then unknown Jasper Johns' Target with Four Faces in the magazine Print and was greatly moved. Ruscha has credited these artists' work as sources 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 are quick to see the influence of Edward Hopper's Gas (1940) in Ruscha's 1963 oil painting, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas.[4] In any case, "Art has to be something that makes you scratch your head," Ruscha said.
Southern California[edit]
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.[5] In 1973, following the model of Every Building on the Sunset Strip, he photographed the entire length of Hollywood Boulevard with a motorized camera.[6] 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.[7] 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).[8]
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.[9] 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).[10] 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.[11] A 2003 portfolio of prints called Los Francisco San Angeles shows street intersections from San Francisco and LA juxtaposed one over the other.[12]
Word paintings[edit]
As with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, his East Coast counterparts, Ed 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.[13] The very first of Ruscha's word paintings were created as oil paintings on paper in Paris in 1961.[14] 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)[15] 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).[16]
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.[17] During the mid-1970s, he made a series of drawings in pastel using pithy phrases against a field of colour.[18] 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).[19] In a series of insidious small abstract paintings from 1994–95, words forming threats are rendered as blank widths of contrasting color like Morse code.[20] Later, words appeared on a photorealist mountain-range series which Ruscha started producing in 1998.[21] For these acrylic-on-canvas works, Ruscha pulled his mountain images either from photographs, commercial logos, or from his imagination.[22]
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)[23] This simple font which is radically different from the style he used in works such as Honk (1962).[24] 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.[25]
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.[26] The fish plays a prominent role throughout the series and appears in nearly half of the paintings.[27] Another frequent element is Ruscha's continuous depiction of a graphite pencil – broken, splintered, melted, transformed.
Odd media[edit]
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.[28] 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.[29] 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 colourings usually dried to a range of muted greys, mustards and browns.[30] 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.[31]
Motifs in light[edit]
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.[32] 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[edit]
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.[33] 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.[34]
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.[35] 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.[36] 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.[37]
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.[38] Ruscha is regularly commissioned with works for private persons, among them James Frey (Public Stoning, 2007),[39] Lauren Hutton (Boy Meets Girl , 1987),[40] and Stella McCartney (Stella, 2001).[41] 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.[42]
Between 1962 and 1978, Ruscha produced sixteen small artist's books:
- Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962
- 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)
- 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.[43] 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.[44]
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.[45]
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,[46] 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.[47] Mostly devoid of human presence, these photographs emphasize the essential form of the structure and its placement within the built environment.[48] 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.[49] 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.[50]
Films and documentaries[edit]
In the 1970s, Ruscha also made a series of largely unknown short movies, such as Premium (1971) and Miracle (1975).[51] With the assistance of a Guggenheim Foundation 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.[52] 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.[53]
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.[54] 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.[55]
Birth of "Pop Art"[edit]
In 1962 Ruscha's work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Dowd, Phillip Hefferton, Joe Goode, Jim Dine, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the historically important and ground-breaking "New Painting of Common Objects," curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum. This exhibition is historically considered one of the first "Pop Art" exhibitions in America.
Ruscha had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. In 1966, Ruscha was included in "Los Angeles Now" at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London, his first European exhibition. In 1968, he had his first European solo show in Cologne, Germany, at Galerie Rudolf Zwirner. Ruscha joined the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1970 and had his first solo exhibition there in 1973.[56]
In 1970 Ruscha represented the United States at the Venice Biennale as part of a survey of American printmaking with an on-site workshop. He constructed Chocolate Room, a visual and sensory experience where the visitor saw 360 pieces of paper permeated with chocolate and hung like shingles on the gallery walls. The pavilion in Venice smelled like a chocolate factory.[57] For the Venice Biennale in 1976, Ruscha created an installation entitled Vanishing Cream, consisting of letters written in Vaseline petroleum jelly on a black wall. Ruscha was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, showing the site- and occasion-specific a painting cycle Course of Empire.[58]
He has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives, beginning in 1983 with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (traveling to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2000, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in 2001. In 2004, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney mounted a selection of the artist's photographs, paintings, books and drawings that traveled to the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome and to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
In 1998, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles organized a retrospective solely devoted to Ruscha's works on paper. In 2004, The Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited a second Ruscha drawing retrospective, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and then to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
In 1999, the Walker Art Center mounted Edward Ruscha: Editions 1959-1999, a major retrospective of the artist's prints, books, and graphic works, which number well over 300.[59] The show travelled to the LACMA in 2000.[60] Ruscha coauthored the catalogue raisonné with Walker curator Siri Engberg.[61] In July 2012, Reading Ed Ruscha opened at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria.
In 2006, an exhibition of Ruscha's photographs was organized for the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
In October 2009, London's Hayward Gallery featured the first retrospective to focus exclusively on Ruscha's canvases. Entitled "Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting," the exhibition sheds light on his influences, such as comics, graphic design, and hitchhiking.[62] The exhibition travelled to Haus der Kunst, Munich, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. "Ed Ruscha: Road Tested," opened at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas in January 2011. The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles prepared an exhibition with Ruscha inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which opened in mid-2011 (traveled to Denver Art Museum, Colorado in December 2011 and Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Florida in May 2012).
In 2016, there was a large 99 piece exhibit of Ruscha's paintings and prints in San Francisco's M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. The exhibit, "Ed Ruscha and the Great American West,"[63] focuses primarily on how the artist drew inspiration from the American West. In 1956, Ruscha drove from his home in Oklahoma to Los Angeles where he hoped to attend art school. While driving in a 1950 Ford sedan, the 18 year old artist drew inspiration from dilapidated gas stations, billboards, and telephone poles cross the great expanse of the land. This inspiration from the American West across Route 66 stuck with Ruscha his whole life. The artists paintings of the West reflect both symbolic and ironic renditions of how we imagine the West.
In 2003, Ed Ruscha curated "Emerson Woelffer: A Solo Flight", a survey of the work of the late Los Angeles-based Abstract Expressionist, for the inaugural exhibition of the Gallery at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater).[64] In 2012, Ruscha was invited to curate "The Ancients Stole All Our Great Ideas" at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the first exhibition in a series for which internationally renowned artists were invited to work with the national art and natural history collections.[65]
In 2000, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, a branch of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, acquired Ruscha's complete graphic archive of 325 prints and 800 working proofs. The museum bought the archive and negotiated for impressions of future prints for $10 million,[66] with funds provided by San Francisco philanthropist Phyllis Wattis.[67] Another major collection of Ruscha's prints was compiled by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.[68] In 2003, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles acquired the Chocolate Room, then worth about $1.5 million.[69] In 2004, the Whitney Museum acquired more than 300 photographs through a purchase and gift from the artist, making it the principal repository of Ruscha's photographic oevre. The gift, purchased from Larry Gagosian, includes vintage photographs that Ruscha took on a seven-month European tour in 1961.[70] In 2005, Leonard A. Lauder purchased The Old Tool & Die Building (2004) and The Old Trade School Building (2005) for the Whitney, both of which were part of "The Course of Empire: Paintings by Ed Ruscha" at the Venice Biennale.[71] Ruscha is represented by 33 of his works in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles;[72] the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art owns 25 important Ruscha paintings, works on paper, and photographs;[73] and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has 21 Ruschas in its permanent collection.[74] Private collections holding substantial numbers of Ruscha's work include the Broad Collection housed at the The Broad,[75] and the UBS Art Collection. Ruscha also has a small collection of books and lithographs in the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, Utah.[76] These works are currently not under exhibit, however, the museum regularly changes their exhibits by displaying art from archives.
- 2001: Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member of the Department of Art, after having previously received its Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Fund Award in 1992′.[77]
- 2001: Honorary doctorate degree from California College of the Arts[citation needed]
- 2002: amfAR's Award of Excellence for Artistic Contributions to the Fight Against AIDS[78]
- 2004: Honorary Royal Academician of London's Royal Academy of Arts[79]
- 2006: The Cultural Award from the German Society for Photography (DGPh)[80]
- 2008: Aspen Award for Art[citation needed]
- 2008: Honorary doctorate degree from Rhode Island School of Design[citation needed]
- 2009: National Arts Award for Artistic Excellence[81]
- 2009: Honorary doctorate degree from San Francisco Art Institute[82]
- 2013: Named in Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world[83]
- 2013: Honored on the occasion of the Whitney Museum of American Art's annual gala event[84]
Fellow artist Louise Lawler included Ruscha in her piece Birdcalls (1972/2008), an audio artwork that transforms the names of famous male artists into a bird song, parroting names such as Artschwager, Beuys, and Warhol in a mockery of conditions of privilege and recognition given to male artists at that time.[85] The muralist Kent Twitchell painted an 11,000-square-foot mural in Downtown Los Angeles to honor Ruscha entitled the Ed Ruscha Monument between 1978 and 1987. The mural was preserved until 2006 when it was illegally painted over. The band Talking Heads Ruscha's eponymous 1974 painting for their "Sand in the Vaseline" compilation album. The band Various Cruelties, based around Liam O'Donnell, was named after Ruscha's painting of the same name of 1974.
Between 2006 and 2012, Ruscha served on the board of trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Los Angeles where he had previously been included in eight special exhibits.[86] In 2012, he was the honoree of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Art + Film gala; in a speech, the museums's director Michal Govan paid tribute to the artist, quoting the novelist J. G. Ballard: "Ed Ruscha has the coolest gaze in American art."[87] Ruscha was elected to a three-year term on the board of trustees of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2013.[88]
In 2009, Ruscha's I Think I'll… (1983) from the collection of the National Gallery was installed at the White House.[89] In 2010, during British prime minister David Cameron's first visit to Washington, President Barack Obama presented him with a signed two-colour lithograph by Ruscha, Column With Speed Lines (2003), chosen for its red, white and blue colours.[90] Obama gave Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott a similar lithograph during his visit to the White House in 2014.[91]
Art market[edit]
As early as 2002, the oil on canvas word painting Talk About Space (1963), a takeoff on the American billboard in which a single word is the subject, was expected to sell for $1.5 million to $2 million from a private European collection. It was eventually sold for $3.5 million at Christie's in New York, a record for the artist.[92] In 2008, Eli Broad acquired Ruscha's "liquid word" painting Desire (1969) for $2.4 million[93] at Sotheby's, which back then was 40 percent under the $4 million low estimate.[94] A navy blue canvas with the word Smash in yellow, which Ruscha painted in 1963, was purchased by Larry Gagosian for $30.4 million at a 2014 Christie's auction in New York.[95]
Angry Because It's Plaster, Not Milk from 1965, which had been shown at Ferus Gallery that year, was later sold by Halsey Minor to Gagosian Gallery[96] for $3.2 million[97] at Phillips de Pury & Company, New York, in 2010. From the same series, Strange Catch for a Fresh Water Fish (1965) made $4.1 million at Christie's New York in 2011.[98]
Ruscha's classic prints, published as multiples, command up to $40,000 apiece.[99]
Hamilton Press[edit]
Hamilton Press came into being in 1990, as a result of a collaboration between Ed Ruscha and printer Ed Hamilton. It makes lithographs with artists like George Condo, Greg Colson and Raymond Pettibon.[citation needed]
Personal life[edit]
Ruscha was married to Danna Ruscha (née Knego[100]) from 1967 to 1972. They remarried in 1987. He has two children, Edward "Eddie" Ruscha Jr. and Sonny Bjornson, a daughter. In the late seventies, Ruscha bought land about ten miles from Pioneertown, California; he later built a house there.[101]
According to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Ruscha donated $12,500 to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton in September 2016.[102]
In 2011, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute acquired over seventy photographs by Ruscha as well as his "Streets of Los Angeles" archive, including thousands of negatives, hundreds of photographic contact sheets, and related documents and ephemera. A portion of the material will go to the Getty as a promised gift from the artist. The "Streets of Los Angeles" archive acquired by the Getty Research Institute begins with the photographic and production material for Ruscha's landmark 1966 book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, and includes the original camera-ready three-panel maquette used for the publication. This ongoing project subsequently evolved into a vast photographic archive that spans over four decades and documents many major Los Angeles thoroughfares, including Santa Monica Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, and Pacific Coast Highway, shot in 1974 and 1975, and more than 25 other Los Angeles streets that Ruscha photographed since 2007. In total, the archive comprises thousands of negatives, hundreds of photographic contact sheets, and related documents and ephemera.[103]
In 2013, the Harry Ransom Center acquired a Ruscha archive comprising five personal journals filled with preliminary sketches and notes; materials related to the making of his artist's book On The Road (2010); notes, photographs, correspondence and contact sheets relating to the creation and publication of his many other artist's books; and materials relating to his short films Miracle (1975) and Premium (1971); his portfolios; and several art commissions. Ruscha himself donated a substantial portion of the archive to the Ransom Center.[104]
External links[edit]
|Library resources about
Edward Ruscha
|By Edward Ruscha
- Edward Ruscha in the National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler Collection
- Oral history interview with Edward Ruscha, Smithsonian Archives of American Art
- Excerpts from a 1965 Artforum interview of Ruscha discussing his artist books
- Edward Ruscha: An Inventory of His Papers and Art Collection at the Harry Ransom Center
- Edward Ruscha Photographs of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, 1965-2010. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 2012.M.1.
- American contemporary artists
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- Painters from California
- Photographers from California
- American pop artists
- 20th-century American painters
- American male painters
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- 20th-century American artists
- 1937 births
- Living people
- Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
- Artists from Oklahoma
- Guggenheim Fellows
- Artists from Omaha, Nebraska
- People from Venice, Los Angeles
- Art in the Greater Los Angeles Area
- Northwest Classen High School alumni
- 20th-century American printmakers
Ed Ruscha – The Tension of Words and Images | TateShots
Ed Ruscha began his career as a layout artist at a Los Angeles advertising agency in the late 1950s. He has continued to draw on this background, producing works that demonstrate an ongoing interest in typography, signage and the West Coast of the United States.
His creates paintings in which text is superimposed over landscapes and traditional American vistas, where the bold lettering is in complete opposition to the idyllic, idealised and somewhat kitsch representations of the images. Through this playful and characteristically enigmatic conflation of image and text, Ruscha explores the viewer's interpretation of language and transforms the words into subjects in themselves.
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Ed Ruscha
Painter, Photographer, Draughtsman, and Conceptual Artist
Movement: Pop Art
Born: December 16, 1937 – Omaha, Nebraska
Key Ideas
Most Important Art
Influences and Connections
"All my artistic response comes from American things, and I guess I've always had a weakness for heroic imagery."
For over 50 years, Ed Ruscha has delivered wryly detached portraits of the ephemera of our lives, found deeply embedded within various subcultures, most notably that of Southern California. Through his lens, familiar imagery such as specific architectural gems, common motifs within consumer culture, or font-specific words elevated as objects are bestowed an iconic status. His fodder is often garnered from the environments in which he lives and works, pulling in a mixed bag of visuals from the film and advertising industries as well as a thriving vortex of trends and memes stemming from an area often noted for being the birthplace of "cool." Ed Ruscha is the quintessential Los Angeles artist whose work catapulted Pop art from a form that merely highlighted the universal ordinary into a form in which the ordinary could now be viewed in relation to its geographically intrinsic cultural contexts. In his hands Pop becomes personal.
Key Ideas
Most Important Art
Boss (1961)
Ruscha claims that Boss was his first mature painting. It was the first of a long series of word paintings where Ruscha created single-canvas works each featuring a word with strong connotations and a powerful visual impact. Later versions included Honk, Smash, Noise, and Oof. Ruscha later stated that the word "boss" "was a powerful word to me, and it meant various things – an employer, and a term for something cool. Also, a brand of work clothes." Ruscha uses this multiplicity of meaning to encourage the viewer to consider all the subconscious connotations of the word. This could be expanded to an exploration of the subconscious meanings hidden in all forms of language. Art historian Margit Rowell argues that looking at Boss is similar to looking at a billboard from a car window, which is not dissimilar from watching the opening screens of a movie.
Ruscha used thick layers of oil paint to create Boss. His use of impasto and dark-brown and black paint gives the word a heavy visual weight as an image-object as well as a linguistic signifier. It also has what Ruscha has called "a certain comedic value," since there is an element of the surreal or the absurd about placing so much emphasis on a commonplace, mundane word. The painting doesn't take itself too seriously, and is playful as well as thought provoking. Ruscha later said of his work, "I'm dead serious about being nonsensical."
Ed Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska to a Roman Catholic family that included his father Edward, mother Dorothy and siblings Paul and Shelby. His father worked as an auditor for an insurance company and his job took the family to Oklahoma City, where they lived for 15 years. Although Edward was very religious and strict, Dorothy was a lover of music, literature, and art, and introduced her children to these features of high culture.
Ruscha's artistic talents developed at a young age. He particularly enjoyed drawing cartoons, an interest he maintained for many years. Although his mother supported his decision to apply to art school, Ed's father was unhappy about the idea. Though, when his son gained a place at Chouinard Art Institute in California, he changed his mind because he had read that Walt Disney often offered well-paid jobs to its graduates.
Early Training
When Ruscha moved to Los Angeles in 1956 to attend Chouinard, (now known as the prestigious California Institute of Arts), he was instantly attracted to the Los Angeles lifestyle. He later recalled, "They had a hot-rod culture here, they had palm trees, they had blonde beach bunnies in the sand. There was progressive jazz happening at the same time. All of that added up to a possibly attractive future." He dove into the lifestyle and got involved in editing and producing "Orb", an art and design journal.
While he was studying in LA, his father died. His mother Dorothy decided that she needed to expand her horizons so after Ruscha graduated, he went on a trip to Europe in the summer of 1961 with his mother and brother. They traveled for four months, buying a small car in Paris and using it to visit countries all over Europe. Ruscha visited museums, but found he wasn't gripped by the art of previous centuries. Instead, when he returned to Paris at the end of the trip, he spent time walking through the streets and painting local signage, such as those above the Metro stations.
Ed Ruscha is now seen as a Made in L.A. artist, with his borrowing from popular culture and his evocation of the landscapes of the city and its surroundings. Working as part of the Pop art movement, his work was to influence a younger generation of artists, particularly Neo-Pop artists such as Jeff Koons. Furthermore, Ruscha's creation of canvases featuring single words were to influence other artists such as Martin Creed, whose text-based projects have a similar impact. His work also has a lot in common with conceptual text-based practices developed in the 1960s by artists such as Lawrence Wiener and Joseph Kosuth.
Ruscha's artist books, such as his Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962), have also been highly influential. Artists have responded to his books on an international scale over the last 60 years, including Bruce Nauman, whose Burning Small Fires (1968) consisted of a series of photographs of the artist burning a copy of Ed Ruscha's artist book Various Small Fires and Milk (1964).
Influences and Connections
An artist in the right place.
If you need cheering up, go to the Museum of Modern Art and look at a painting called "Oof," by Edward Ruscha. The title and the subject are identical, just those three block letters, each one bigger than your head, in cadmium yellow on a background of cobalt blue. The six-foot-square canvas currently hangs in Gallery 19, on the fourth floor, along with Roy Lichtenstein's "Girl with Ball," Andy Warhol's "Gold Marilyn Monroe" and "Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times," and other Pop Art trailblazers of the early nineteen-sixties. "Oof" outdoes them all in its immediate, antic impact. This is not the kind of picture that reveals hidden depths on subsequent viewings. Everything is right there, every time, and it never fails to make me feel good.
Ruscha (pronounced Ru-shay) was twenty-six when he painted it, in 1963, three years out of art school, living in Los Angeles, and already hitting his stride. He had vetoed the spontaneous, loose-elbow, Abstract Expressionist style that still prevailed at the Chouinard Art Institute, where he studied in the late nineteen-fifties, shortly before it became the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). "They would say, Face the canvas and let it happen, follow your own gestures, let the painting create itself," he later recalled in an interview, but that didn't pan out for him. Ruscha had seen, reproduced in the magazine Print, a Jasper Johns collage painting called "Target with Four Faces," and it had opened up a new range of possibilities. He decided that whatever he was going to do in art would have to be "completely premeditated."
He made a few Johns-influenced paintings. One showed a can of Spam rocketing through space; in another, a real box of Sun-Maid raisins was flattened on a canvas, above the partly painted-over place name "Vicksburg." Very soon, he zeroed in on the Johnsian notion of painting words. "It was so simple, and something I could commit to," he said last winter, when I visited him in Los Angeles. Ruscha, at seventy-five, is lean and fit, and his natural reserve is offset by an easygoing friendliness. We were sitting in the library and office space of his immense, warehouse-like studio in Culver City, which he moved into two years ago. Los Angeles was having a cold snap, the heat wasn't working, and Ruscha had lent me a heavy-duty parka to wear. "I would settle on a word like 'boss,' " he said. "That was a powerful word to me, and it meant various things—an employer, and a term for something cool. Also, a brand of work clothes." "Boss" appeared in 1961, black letters on a dark-brown background, and was followed, during the next three years, by "Honk," "Smash," "Noise," "Oof," "Won't," and other word paintings. He chose commonplace, one-syllable words that had what he described as "a certain comedic value." "Oof" was different—onomatopoeic, for one thing, and funnier. "It had one foot in the world of cartooning," he explained, speaking slowly and lingering over a word now and then, as though to savor its quiddity. "You get punched in the stomach, and that's 'Oof.' It was so obvious, and so much a part of my growing up in the U.S.A. I felt like it was almost a patriotic word." Ruscha, who was born in Omaha in 1937, and spent his childhood in Oklahoma City, may be the only living American who can discern patriotism in a grunt. Our conversation was interrupted at this point by Woody, a large, thirteen-year-old mixed-breed and somewhat arthritic dog, who was making plaintive noises; Ruscha got up and helped him out the back door.
"Oof" had an adventurous early life. Ruscha lent it to his childhood friend Mason Williams, and a few years later, when Williams was working as the head comedy writer for the Smothers Brothers, he let Tommy Smothers borrow it. The picture fell off a wall in Smothers's house and landed face down on a chessboard, whose sharp-tipped metal pieces punctured the canvas in several places. Ruscha took it back, got it repaired, did some repainting, and kept it until 1988, when a group of very wealthy donors bought it for the Museum of Modern Art.
Language has often invaded the visual arts during the past century, but no other artist uses it the way Ruscha does. His early paintings are not pictures of words but words treated as visual constructs. "I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again," he once said. "I see myself working with two things that don't even ask to understand each other."
Los Angeles was largely oblivious of the visual arts in the early nineteen-sixties. Unlike San Francisco, which considered itself the cultural capital of the West, L.A. had no significant art museum, few galleries, and only a handful of people who would even think of buying contemporary art. It did have a crop of obstreperous young artists, though, and in 1962 Walter Hopps, a former U.C.L.A. student who had just been named curator of the quaint, unassuming Pasadena Art Museum, put several of them in a group exhibition there called "New Painting of Common Objects." It was the first American museum show of what would soon be known as Pop Art, and it included, along with works by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Jim Dine, three recent paintings by Ed Ruscha.
A year later, Ruscha had his first one-man show at the Ferus Gallery, which Hopps and the artist Edward Keinholz had started in 1957, in the back room of an antique shop on North La Cienega Boulevard. In addition to his single-word images, the 1963 Ferus show included the more ambitious "Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights," an eleven-foot-wide view of the Twentieth Century Fox logo as a three-dimensional monolith, and "Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western," in which the word and the three objects, meticulously reproduced in their actual sizes, seemed to be trying to escape from the picture. The paintings were priced between a hundred and fifty and four hundred dollars, and six of them were sold—a remarkable début. That same year, Ruscha finished "Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas," the first of his many paintings, drawings, and prints of gas stations, whose dramatic, raked perspective came from an effect he had observed in old black-and-white films. "You know those movies where a train starts out in the lower-right corner and gradually fills the screen?" he asked. "The gas station is on a diagonal like that, from lower right to upper left. It also had something to do with teachings I picked up in art school, about dividing the picture plane. I didn't really know what I was up to then, or what direction to take. I was just following these little urges. It was pure joy, to be able to do something like that."
In 1965, the opening of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in its Wilshire Boulevard location signalled a new era in the city's cultural development. Ruscha observed the event with another eleven-foot-wide painting that showed the museum complex in all its boxy, corporate-modern banality, but with smoke and flames shooting out of the Ahmanson Building, and not a single human being in sight. "Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire" and several other Ruscha paintings of burning buildings are sometimes cited as evidence of a "dark side" in his art, but they don't seem dark to me. My guess is that he really liked painting orange flames. The lacma picture does give rise to thoughts about the city's expanding cultural pretensions, though, and I asked Ruscha whether this had been part of his intention. Not really, he said. "I went on a helicopter ride over L.A., and took some Polaroid pictures of the museum from the air, and it just sort of went on from there." But the fire? "Well, there's always a little room for questioning authorities." Joseph Hirshhorn, the uranium millionaire, bought the painting in 1968, and eventually gave it to the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, D.C. This is a source of undying regret to Michael Govan, the current director of the Los Angeles County Museum, who considers it a quintessential Los Angeles picture.
The engine of Los Angeles culture is Hollywood, but until quite recently there were few connections between the movie crowd and the Los Angeles art community. Film stars who collect art have been extremely rare, and lacma and the other art institutions that have emerged since 1965 have had amazingly bad luck attracting the financial support of Hollywood moguls. One of the few people with ties to both camps is Ruscha. He has dated starlets, models (Lauren Hutton, Léon Bing), and at least one bona-fide movie star, Samantha Eggar, with whom he lived for several years during the nineteen-eighties. Ruscha made two short, 16-mm. films in the nineteen-seventies, applying traditional Hollywood methods to weird plots. In "Premium," a man takes a young woman (Bing) to a seedy room, has her strip and lie down on a bed covered with freshly tossed salad, then goes to an expensive hotel room, alone, and eats Premium crackers. "Miracle," the second film, follows the lead actor's unexplained transformation, while repairing a carburetor, from a greasy auto mechanic to an immaculate lab technician.
Hollywood films and cinematic perspectives have influenced many of Ruscha's paintings, but the underlying subject of his work has always been Los Angeles itself. He saw the place for the first time when he was fourteen, on a car trip with his parents, and when he came back in 1956 to go to art school, driving from Oklahoma City with Mason Williams, there were no disappointments. Nearly everything about the city appealed to him—the endless sprawl, the two-story apartment houses with outdoor stairways, the hot rods, the jazz clubs, the billboards, the sunrises and sunsets, the boulevards that led to the ocean.
He roomed in a succession of boarding houses and cheap apartments in the Hollywood area, and took restaurant jobs to stay afloat. His parents were paying his tuition at Chouinard. Ruscha's father, a strict Catholic and a rigid disciplinarian whose parents came from Germany (where the family name was Rusiska), worked for thirty years as an auditor with the Hartford Insurance Company in Oklahoma City. He had been unhappy about his son's decision to go to art school, but he changed his mind after reading, in The Saturday Evening Post, that Chouinard was supported largely by Walt Disney, and that many of its students became well-paid animators for the Disney studio. During his second year at Chouinard, Ruscha lived with his former schoolmate Joe Goode and three other Oklahoma-born art students in a ramshackle house in East Hollywood, where the combined rent was sixty dollars a month. Several of them, including Ruscha, had live-in girlfriends. Ever since high school, girls had doted on Ruscha—they found him shy and laconic, but wickedly handsome, and cooler than Cary Grant.
After graduating from Chouinard, in 1960, Ruscha took a full-time job with the Carson/Roberts advertising agency. Although he (and his father) had assumed that he would become a commercial artist, he hated the work and quit after a few months. In 1961, he went to Europe, with his mother and his younger brother, Paul. Their father had died two years earlier, and their older sister, Shelby, had married a Venezuelan engineer and was living in Caracas. Dorothy Ruscha, whose zest for music and books and art had helped to make life in Oklahoma City more bearable for the three children, decided it was time that she, too, saw more of the world. They started in Paris, where Dorothy bought a blue Citroën 2CV, and during the next four months they drove through France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, and then Ireland (where her people came from), Scotland, and England. Paul left the tour early, to attend his high-school sweetheart's graduation. Dorothy flew home from London, and Ruscha, on his own, returned to Paris for a month. Although he made dutiful visits to museums, older art didn't interest him. He spent most of his time walking the streets and painting small pictures, with oil on paper, of signs (the Art Nouveau entrance to the Metro) and other local insignia.
Stopping off in New York City on his way back, he paid a call on Leo Castelli, whose gallery showed Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. No introduction, no calling beforehand—he just walked in with the Paris paintings under his arm. Castelli, all European charm and suavity, said that Ruscha's work looked interesting, and told him to stay in touch. Ruscha stayed in touch for twelve years, visiting the gallery on his occasional trips to New York, and in 1973 Castelli became his New York dealer. Ruscha never seriously considered moving East. "That was too big a decision, and too big a jump," he told me. "It just didn't feel like it was meant to be." He wanted to live in Los Angeles, and by the time he returned from Europe he knew that the only thing he could possibly be was an artist. "I could see I was just born for the job, born to watch paint dry," he said.
Steve Martin and his wife, Anne Stringfield, live near the top of a steep drive in Beverly Hills. Martin is one of the renegade Hollywood stars who love and collect art—early modern and contemporary, although nothing as yet by Ruscha. I had dinner there one night, along with Ruscha and his wife, Danna, a vivacious woman with blond hair and a warm smile. Danna and Ed met in 1965, when Danna was working as an animator for the Hanna-Barbera studio, and they were married in 1967. Their son, Edward Joseph Ruscha, called Eddie, was born a year later. The marriage broke up in 1972, and Ruscha had a number of relationships with other women. His daughter, Sonny Bjornson, who is now in her twenties, works for the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, and is about to be married. Eddie Ruscha, a CalArts graduate who paints and composes music, helps out in his father's studio every Monday, filling in the backgrounds of some of the large-scale paintings. He and his wife, the artist Francesca Gabbiani, have two children. Ruscha is close to his children and grandchildren, and he has stayed friendly with many of his former girlfriends. He and Danna got together again in the nineteen-eighties, and they remarried in 1988, in Las Vegas, at the same chapel they used the first time.
After dinner, we all drove partway down the hill and stopped at the Ruschas' house. Its previous owner was the Hollywood agent Swifty Lazar, and nearly every room offered sweeping views of the city. There were paintings by modern and contemporary artists on the walls, but only one, near the kitchen, was by Ruscha. Impressed by the twelve Kandinsky prints in the master bathroom, Martin asked whether we could watch Ed take a shower. A lot of barking came from the other end of the house, where Danna had put Woody and six other dogs she has adopted from rescue shelters. (She has found homes for around two hundred and fifty others.)
Oscar Wilde said that George Bernard Shaw had no enemies but his friends didn't like him. Ruscha seems to have no enemies and his friends like him, but even old friends, like the artist John Baldessari, sometimes feel that they don't know him very well. "You have to get through that veil," Baldessari told me. Many observers have pointed out that human beings almost never appear in Ruscha's work. During dinner, apropos of nothing, Martin had said, "I've known Ed for forty years, but I've only known him really well for the last fifteen minutes."
By the mid-nineteen-sixties, Los Angeles had supplanted San Francisco as the West Coast center for contemporary art. Its art schools drew ambitious students from around the country, and many of them, lulled by the climate and by the availability of inexpensive studio spaces, elected to stay there. Although the Los Angeles County Museum of Art paid scant attention to anything done after 1950, a few more contemporary galleries had opened, and a California school of art and artists had emerged, with two main branches: Ferus artists such as Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, John Altoon, and Edward Kienholz, who applied Abstract Expressionist paint handling or Rauschenberg-inspired collage to their often scathing interpretations of popular culture; and the so-called "finish fetish" artists, including Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, and Robert Irwin, whose pristine, obsessively worked forms became California's version of minimalism. Irving Blum, a boundlessly optimistic young entrepreneur who had moved from New York to Los Angeles with the idea of starting an art gallery there, bought out Ed Kienholz's share in the Ferus Gallery in 1958, and changed its focus, dropping many of the locals (but taking on Ruscha) and bringing in some of New York's emerging Pop artists. He gave Andy Warhol his first one-man show anywhere, at the Ferus in 1962. A year later, Walter Hopps filled the rapidly modernizing Pasadena Art Museum with works by Marcel Duchamp—his first retrospective. Ruscha saw the show and met Duchamp, whose readymades—common manufactured objects elevated to the status of art by his act of choosing them—had made a big impression on him when he was in art school.
Leo Castelli used to say, in the late sixties, that Los Angeles was poised to rival and maybe surpass New York as the new art mecca, but that didn't happen. The handful of West Coast collectors whom Hopps, Blum, Nicholas Wilder, and a few other dealers had worked so hard to develop were happy to look at contemporary art in L.A., but they preferred to buy it in New York. Blum had infuriated the Ferus group by showing New York artists at what they considered "their" gallery; he did this to keep the gallery afloat, and because he loved the work, but he could never sell enough of it. The Ferus closed in 1967. Artforum, the authoritative journal that had moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 1965, pulled up stakes and moved to New York. Later, so did Blum. Hopps left to work for the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington, D.C. Norton Simon, the California food-services billionaire, took over the financially shaky Pasadena Museum in 1975, deëmphasized its contemporary holdings, and filled the premises with his collection of Impressionists and Old Masters. In torching the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ruscha was a more accurate prophet than Castelli. The fizzling of expectations, though, left many Los Angeles artists with a lingering resentment of New York and New York artists.
Some of the original Ferus people had doubts about Ruscha, who was never really part of their macho, highly contentious fraternity. (Mary Dean, who has been his assistant and studio manager since 1998, told me that she has never seen him lose his temper.) "They thought he was too Pop-oriented," Blum said. "But then the big paintings started appearing—'Standard Station,' and the Twentieth Century Fox one—and they came around." There were certainly Pop elements in Ruscha's paintings, along with echoes of Surrealism and Dada, but his work had more in common with the conceptual word games being played by Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, and other language-based artists in New York. Ruscha's style and subject matter, however, and the deadpan humor with which he deployed them, set him apart from anyone else on either coast. Reviewers had trouble dealing with Ruscha because his work fell into none of the useful categories. It still doesn't, and this makes him something of a hero to younger artists who use video, film, live performance, photography, social interactions, and any other means at hand—including paint—to expand the definition of art. "Ed never seems to be speaking to grownups," Adam McEwen, the British-born, New York-based conceptualist, told me recently. "He's so unpretentious, so un-condescending. He actually does deal with great themes, but in an irreverent way."
In 1966, Ruscha did a painting called "Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup," which looked as though he had done exactly that, poured maple syrup on canvas to spell the word "Annie." It led to a three-year series of immensely skillful trompe-l'oeil word pictures, in which he made oil paint resemble any number of viscous fluids. He also did paintings of bowling balls, olives, marbles, amphetamine pills, and other unrelated items that seemed to hover just above the canvas, and drawings in which three-dimensional words appeared to rise up from the surface like paper cutouts. Some of the drawings were done in graphite and others in gunpowder, a medium that he found easier to control than graphite. "I was just making up these things after frustrations with other ways of painting words," he said. The frustrations, whatever they were, brought on what seems to have been the only crisis in Ruscha's professional career. "I can't bring myself to put paint on canvas," he told the critic David Bourdon in 1972. "I find no message there anymore." When I asked Ruscha about this statement, he said, "Well, I don't have any deep recollections of what I was thinking when I said that. It wasn't any kind of life factor." Ruscha, as his mother sometimes pointed out, has always been "a master of evasion."
He didn't paint at all in 1970, but he continued to make drawings and prints. He also showed his work in New York for the first time, at the Alexandre Iolas Gallery, and he created a "Chocolate Room" at the 1970 Venice Biennale. Most of the other American artists invited to participate that year decided to boycott the Biennale in protest against the Vietnam War. "I was against the war, but I didn't see any purpose in the boycott," Ruscha told me. "I was never an activist in that respect." A month earlier, in London, he had made a set of prints using "organic substances" (syrup, axle grease, raw egg, beet juice) instead of ink—an experiment that he carried over into many of the paintings he did after his brief falling-out with oil paint. In Venice, he silkscreened Nestlé's chocolate paste on three hundred and sixty sheets of paper, and used them, shingle style, to cover all four walls of a room. To find the U.S. Pavilion, you could follow your nose.
The Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, does not show modern paintings. It shows photographs, though, and the museum currently has on view a sampling of archival prints from the sixteen photography books that Ruscha published between 1963 and 1972, and film strips from his "Streets of Los Angeles" project, which documents fifty years of what the Getty calls a "deep engagement with Los Angeles's vernacular architecture and the urban landscape." This is a lofty description of something that began, somewhat whimsically, with a forty-eight-page, paperbound booklet called "Twentysix Gasoline Stations."
"I had the title of the book in mind before I even took the photographs," Ruscha told me, on another chilly day in his Culver City studio. He used to drive back to Oklahoma City five or six times a year, to visit his parents, and the gas stations along Route 66 became, he said, "like a musical rhythm to me—cultural belches in the landscape." He started photographing them in 1962, with a Yashica twin-lens reflex camera that he had used in his photography classes at Chouinard. He would stop the car, stand beside it, and shoot the filling station from across the road, deliberately avoiding any sort of composition or artful lighting. His snapshot non-style has been compared to the work of Robert Frank, the Swiss photographer whose seminal book, "The Americans," came out in 1959. Although Ruscha has said that Frank's work "hit me with a sledgehammer," he added that it had no direct influence on his gas-station pictures. Ruscha didn't believe in photography as an art form. He was just getting information and bringing it back, he said, to use in a book. "I just knew I had to make a book of some kind."
A book of some kind. Not a livre d'artiste, one of those high-quality collaborations between an artist and a fine-art printer, and certainly not a coffee-table buster. What he had in mind was a small, cheap, mass-produced publication that looked like an instruction manual, but with no text. He photographed many more than twenty-six gas stations during his trips to Oklahoma and back, and edited them down to twenty-six. (One became the model for his painting of the Standard Station in Amarillo.) "I like the word 'gasoline,' and I like the specific quality of 'twenty-six,' " he explained. Ruscha had spent six months working for a printing firm while he was at Chouinard; he had learned how to set type and to use the photo-offset process, and he published the book himself, in an edition of four hundred copies, priced at three dollars apiece. A few years after the book came out, he realized that it had the "inexplicable thing" that he tries for in a lot of his work—"a kind of 'huh?' " effect. "People would look at it and say, 'Are you kidding or what? Why are you doing this?' That's what I was after—the head-scratching." In 1970, he brought out a second edition of three thousand copies. The Library of Congress returned the copy Ruscha had sent, with a note saying that it did not wish to add the book to its collections. "Twentysix Gasoline Stations" has become a collector's item, and a well-preserved, signed first edition can bring as much as twenty-five thousand dollars.
Next up was "Various Small Fires and Milk"—snapshots of people smoking, a Zippo lighter in action, a trash fire, and other mundane conflagrations—and, at the end, a cooling glass of milk. During the next nine years, fourteen more books appeared, among them "Some Los Angeles Apartments," "Every Building on the Sunset Strip," "Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass," "Real Estate Opportunities" (vacant lots), and "Royal Road Test"—a photographic record of what happened to Ruscha's Royal Standard typewriter when Mason Williams threw it out the window of a car that was travelling ninety miles an hour, with Ruscha driving. Compared with his paintings, he said, "The books were easy for me. I didn't have to struggle, and I felt like I was operating on blind faith more than on any kind of decisions. It was as though somebody else was designing them." Ruscha's books can be seen as a triumph of the "huh?" factor. "Wow, all the buildings on Sunset fucking Strip," John Altoon, the Ferus artist, marvelled. The books' appeal to other artists has been cumulative and worldwide. A recent exhibition that Bob Monk put together at the Gagosian Gallery featured self-published books in response to Ruscha by more than a hundred artists in the United States, Europe, Russia, and Japan, some done as recently as last year. Among the titles were "None of the Buildings on the Sunset Strip," "Fiftytwo Shopping Trolleys," "Every coffee I drank in January 2010," "Eminent Erections," "Vingt-Six Stations Service," and "73 Häuser von Sinemoretz."
As a boy in Oklahoma City, delivering newspapers on his bike every morning, Ruscha had thought about making a detailed model that showed all the houses along his route, something he "could study like an architect standing over a table and plotting a city." He never did it, but the memory led to his Sunset Strip book. To photograph the approximately two-mile strip of Sunset Boulevard, Ruscha stood in the back of a pickup truck while a friend drove. They did it early in the morning, when there were no pedestrians and almost no traffic. Ruscha shot both sides of the street, and in the book the pages are joined to form an accordion-pleated panorama that unfolds to twenty-seven feet. In 1965, he photographed the entire twenty-two miles of Sunset Boulevard, which runs from downtown L.A., through Hollywood and Bel Air and Beverly Hills, to the Pacific Ocean.
"My intention was not to have a goal in mind, but just to record a street in a very faithful way," he said. "Sometimes there are no storefronts and it's just land, and I photograph that, too." Ruscha was speaking in the present tense because he and his team, which includes Gary Regester, a professional photographer who is based in Colorado, and Paul Ruscha, re-photograph Sunset Boulevard every three years or so. Paul, who has worked for his brother since 1973, photographs and documents every piece of art Ruscha makes. After their father died, in 1959, he told me, "Ed became my dad, and he still is." In addition to Sunset, they have photographed Sepulveda, which is more than forty miles long, Melrose, Hollywood Boulevard, La Cienega, and a number of other arteries, including the Pacific Coast Highway. Until the current Getty exhibition, Ruscha had never shown any of this material. Two years ago, the entire backlog—hundreds of reels of still photographs, plus a few experiments with film and video—was acquired by the Getty Research Center, which has the facilities to archive and preserve it, including the updates he keeps sending. Nobody seems to know whether the vast project is an art work or a form of urban documentation, but the general feeling is that it is both.
Ruscha and I spent a day driving around Los Angeles. The weather had turned warm again, and before we set off he showed me his garden, behind the studio. It is more like a small orchard. "Blood oranges and grapefruits right here, and some mandarin tangerines, and three avocados over there," he said. "Lemon, kumquat, pomegranate, figs, cauliflower, lettuce, peppers, and looks like I also have a gopher." He pointed to a hole, and then to a withered stalk a few feet away. "That was the world's hottest pepper, called bhut jolokia, but it died." When one of the plants dies, he scratches its name and dates on a metal disk and adds it to others on a wood plank that he keeps in the studio. Near the garden is an outdoor painting studio, and a parking space for his 2000 black Lexus and a couple of antique cars he's reconditioned—a 1939 Ford and a 1933 Ford pickup. We got into the Lexus, and turned left onto Jefferson Boulevard.
Ruscha drives smoothly, both hands on the wheel, window open. We passed several boxlike warehouse buildings that looked like the ones in the "Course of Empire" paintings that he did in 2005. A little farther, he motioned toward a building on the left, and said he used to do freelance work there in the nineteen-sixties, for an outfit called Sunset House. He was becoming known as an artist by then, but he wasn't earning much money, so for two weeks before Christmas he would hand-letter names on porcelain frogs and other gift items, including a receptacle for dentures called Ma and Pa Chopper Hopper. When we got to Western Avenue, in East Hollywood, he pointed out a low building where he'd had his studio for more than twenty years. "I would look out my window there, and if I could see the Hollywood sign I'd know the weather wasn't too smoggy," he said. The sign first appeared in Ruscha's work in 1968, in an eight-color screen print. He painted it in 1977, from behind, so that the letters are reversed, and silhouetted against one of the lurid sunsets that L.A. used to have, in the years when the smog was especially bad. Ruscha had returned to oil paint by this time, but he soon shifted to acrylics for the long, narrow landscapes-with-words that he was doing then. The format made you think of CinemaScope.
The words on his new paintings were phrases and sentences, which rarely had a discernible connection to the image: "Thermometers Should Last Forever"; "That Was Then This Is Now"; "Honey . . . I Twisted Through More Damn Traffic to Get Here." Some of the landscapes were more than thirteen feet long—he called them "grand horizontals," the French term for top-of-the-line courtesans, and the words on several of these do suggest male-female relationships. Although Ruscha doesn't paint people, they make their presence felt through language. He uses things that he's overheard people say, or that he's picked up from popular songs, the radio, or the movies. "Brave Men Run in My Family," which appears as both image and title in several pictures, was a Bob Hope line in "The Paleface."
We drove through other neighborhoods where he had lived or once had studios—Echo Park, Laurel Canyon, Silver Lake. "It was a different city then," he said. "Slower. The most important changes I see are these old neighborhoods that are gradually crumbling. Every time they tear down a bungalow-style house, they replace it with a three-story box for twelve families. They're like instant slums. Nevertheless, I like everything here. In some ways, the attraction is invisible. You can't think of one thing to explain it." In 1966, he had said to an interviewer, "Being in Los Angeles has had little or no effect on my work. I could have done it anywhere," but he doesn't say that anymore.
After driving for four hours, with a pause for lunch at Lucy's El Adobe Café, and a detour to see the house where the Black Dahlia murderer was supposed to have lived, and a longer detour to search for and find a hilltop property once owned by George Herriman, whose "Krazy Kat" comics Ruscha had loved when he was growing up, we went back to Culver City and looked at photographs of the small, concrete-block house that Ruscha has owned for forty years in the California High Desert, near Joshua Tree National Monument. He designed it himself, with blueprints provided by his friend Frank Gehry in 1976. "Danna doesn't go anymore," he said. "It's pretty remote—a three-hour drive, and the only other house out there is a mile away." The property has an outdoor painting studio, a wind-powered generator, solar panels for heating, and plenty of wildlife, including rattlesnakes. Ruscha tries to go there every week, alone, for two or three days; he paints, takes long walks, watches baseball on TV (the Dodgers or the Red Sox), does maintenance work on the house, and reads. When I was in L.A., he was halfway through "Moby-Dick," but he also reads a lot of nonfiction, mainly history and science. "I have periods when I feel frustrated living in Los Angeles, when the traffic bothers me and I hate the place," he said. "But then I feel differently and I want to come back."
Ruscha had his first retrospective in 1982, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. On the cover of the exhibition catalogue was his 1979 word drawing "I Don't Want No Retro Spective." He was forty-five years old, and critics still couldn't define what he did. In the catalogue, the writer Dave Hickey complained about the difficulty of summing up "a body of critical opinion which no one had been so bold as to venture." The exhibition travelled to four other museums, including the Whitney and lacma, and the reviews were generally favorable but noncommittal. Writing in the Village Voice, Roberta Smith found the show "an inspiring example of what it means for an artist to be original in a very specific, even limited way, and to be so true to his originality that he is able to try something of everything." At that time, Ruscha was the only Los Angeles artist represented by Leo Castelli, the most powerful name in contemporary art, but even there his status was unclear. He lived in California, and his work could make you laugh, and for some New York artists and critics that meant you didn't take it seriously. "I had no illusions about my position in the art world or at the Castelli gallery," Ruscha told me. "I didn't feel like one of his leading artists, but that didn't bother me, because I could actually make a living from the stipend he was giving me."
Castelli priced Ruscha's paintings between three and four thousand dollars, a lot less than Jasper Johns was getting, but considerably more than Ruscha had earned before joining the gallery. After the retrospective, his prices went up, and his work gradually found a larger audience. In 1985, he was commissioned to do a series of murals for the Miami-Dade Public Library, in Florida. He needed more space, so he moved from Western Avenue to a bigger studio on Electric Avenue, in Venice, and began working on a larger scale. He did a series of "City Lights" pictures, which looked like nocturnal views of Los Angeles from above, with words overlaid in white paint. In many Ruscha pictures, you are looking down on something—an oblique viewpoint he has favored ever since he saw, on his first trip abroad, John Everett Millais's painting of the drowned Ophelia at the Tate, in London. Paul Ruscha gave him a reproduction of this picture, and it rests on an easel in the studio—a talisman of Victorian sentiment, and one of the few examples of older art that Ruscha cites, without irony, as an influence. For his next series, of very large, dark "silhouette" paintings in black-and-white, he used an airbrush to depict blurry images that echoed earlier times—a bison, a wagon train, a four-masted galleon. In the late nineteen-eighties, his work caught on with the new Japanese collectors whose avidity for contemporary Western art was driving auction prices to record highs. "That's me, the twenty-five-year overnight sensation," Ruscha joked. The worldwide recession in 1990 scared off the Japanese, and put an end to the eighties art boom. Ruscha's prices slumped, and stayed down for the next dozen years.
Only in the past decade has he come to be looked upon, in New York and everywhere else, as a major artist. Since 1997, when Castelli retired, Ruscha has shown with Larry Gagosian, whose international network of thirteen galleries has apparently become an art empire too big to fail. Gagosian is Rome to Castelli's Greece, and his most successful artists have proved impervious to the economic recession. Ruscha's 1965-66 "Burning Gas Station" sold at Christie's, in 2007, for just under seven million dollars, and the immense and startlingly kitsch "mountain paintings" that he has been doing since 1997 bring considerably more than a million dollars on the primary market. He borrows his snowcapped mountain landscapes from magazine illustrations or photographs, and uses them as "anonymous backdrops for words." As he explained to me, "I'm not really painting mountains, but an idea of mountains. Maybe I faltered and started thinking it was acceptable to do a postcard-pretty picture." We can assume that at some level he is also sending up the nineteenth-century tradition of nature as the American Sublime. His mountains are scenarios for word frolics, like "Tulsa Slut," "Uh Oh," and "Pay Nothing Until April."
The ten large paintings in Ruscha's "Course of Empire" suite, which premièred at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and came to the Whitney Museum a few months later, introduced a new and surprising element in his work, which looks suspiciously like social commentary. They were inspired by Thomas Cole's allegorical cycle (1833-36) showing the birth, flowering, decline, and destruction of an imaginary city. Ruscha's cool, minimalist treatment of the theme is quieter but more devastating. He took five of the black-and-white "Blue Collar" paintings of industrial sites that he had done in 1992—factories, a trade school, an isolated outdoor telephone booth—and painted five new ones of the same sites, in color, altered by time, circumstance, and his imagination. The trade school is shuttered, the telephone booth is gone, the "Tool and Die" insignia on a factory has given way to lettering in an indecipherable Asian language. A message is being delivered, and it's hard not to think that it has to do with American decline. Donna De Salvo, the Whitney's chief curator, cautioned me against specific readings. "I would never say Ed's work is 'about' something," she said. "The genius of it is that he takes something incredibly familiar and gives it this level of ambiguity." Ruscha was gently dismissive when I brought up the subject of national decline. He said, "From the beginning, I've felt like America is the place where all this throbbing stuff is happening. I don't see the American life style or American influence waning at all." Ambiguity, De Salvo suggests, is his default mode. The (wordless) "Psycho-Spaghetti Western" paintings he showed at Gagosian in 2011 are gorgeous scenarios of waste and destruction—pileups of old mattresses, used lumber, shredded truck tires, and other debris, on desolate landscapes that run uphill on the familiar Ruscha diagonal.
Ruscha's ascent to the upper echelons of art-world esteem has coincided with recurring assurances that Los Angeles is, once again, on the verge of becoming a major art center. Some people believe this has already happened. A great many internationally known artists now live in Los Angeles, including Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy, Chris Burden, Laura Owens, and Ryan Trecartin, and more and more artists are finding that L.A.'s relatively low rents, proliferating galleries, and unstressed openness to new ideas make it a viable alternative to New York. Three museums engage actively in contemporary art: lacma, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, or moca, which opened in 1983 and mobilized big-time support from artists (who gave important works) and billionaire collectors, such as Eli Broad and the late Marcia Weisman, Norton Simon's sister. moca eventually built a collection of post-1940 art that comes close to rivalling that of the Museum of Modern Art, and some of its thematic exhibitions have been bolder and more illuminating than anything being done in New York.
Support for contemporary art here is neither wide nor deep, however, as moca's recent near-death experience makes clear. Having depleted its endowment from nearly forty million dollars in 2000 to five million in 2008, the museum's board of trustees set off a tsunami of criticism last summer by parting company with their longtime chief curator, Paul Schimmel. All four of the artist-trustees, including Ruscha and Baldessari, quit the board in protest. "A lot of artists felt, man, moca is dead," Ruscha told me. "The artists were not shaping its future anymore." Proposals were floated for moca to merge or form a partnership with lacma or the University of Southern California, but the threat of such dire measures quickly receded. Jeffrey Deitch, the former New York gallery owner who became moca's director in 2010, has doubled attendance with several highly popular shows ("Art in the Streets," "Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles"), and he and the board have solicited commitments for a large chunk of the hundred million dollars needed to rebuild the endowment. Schimmel, meanwhile, has become a partner in the internationally powerful Swiss gallery Hauser & Wirth, which will open a Los Angeles branch—called Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel—in 2015.
Like most successful artists, Ruscha would love to have a career-capping museum exhibition in New York. He has had discussions with the Metropolitan Museum (which did a Baldessari retrospective in 2010), and both the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney are said to be interested. Never much of a self-promoter, Ruscha is content to wait, and to continue doing whatever interests him. Last year, he was asked to put together an exhibition composed of works in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, in Vienna, whose collection stops at circa 1800. He got permission to bring in some material from the natural-history museum across the street, and when I was in his studio he showed me photographs of his finds—kidney stones (called "bezoars") from ancient animals, a multipurpose knife made in 1610, a slab of bright-blue argonite—to go with the paintings and the drawings he selected by Brueghel, Bosch, Rubens, Arcimboldo, and other Old Masters.
"Bosch and Brueghel were ahead of their time," he said. "They were fighting against enormous odds to make statements that might be seen as sinful. Looking at their pictures, I see these brown and red tones that seem to evoke history and madness at the same time, and I want to commend them for taking this plunge into madness. I think every artist wants to make a picture that opens the gates to Heaven." Ruscha's title for the Vienna show comes from a line in Mark Twain's autobiography: "The Ancients Stole All Our Great Ideas." ♦