He 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. Ruscha's textual, flat paintings have been linked with both the Pop Art movement and the beat generation.
Education and influences
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 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" in Ruscha's 1963 oil painting, "Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas." In any case, "Art has to be something that makes you scratch your head," Ruscha said.
Southern California
Although Ruscha denies this in interviews, the vernacular of Los Angeles and Southern California landscapes contributes to the themes and styles central to much of Ruscha’s paintings, drawings, and books. Examples of this include the book
Every Building on the Sunset Strip, a book of continuous photographs of a two and one half mile stretch of the 24 mile boulevard. Also, paintings like
Standard Station,
Large Trademark, and
Hollywood 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 it's car culture.
Ruscha completed
Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights in 1961, one year after graduating from college. Among his first paintings (
Su,
Sweetwater,
Vicksburg) 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 and
Wonder Bread.
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.
Word paintings
Since 1964, Ruscha has been experimenting with painting and drawing words and phrases, often oddly comic and satirical sayings. 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.
Odd media
In his drawings, prints, and paintings throughout the 1970s, Ruscha experimented with a range of materials including gunpowder, blood, fruit and vegetable juices, axle grease, and grass stains.
Stains, an editioned portfolio of 75 stained sheets of paper produced and published by Ruscha in 1969, bears the traces of a variety of materials and fluids. Ruscha has also produced his word paintings with food products on moiré and silks.
Motifs in light
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 and
99% DEVIL, 1% ANGEL. 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).In 2006, the Jeu de Paume in Paris hosted a major retrospective of his photographs.
Books
Ruscha has published the following photographic 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
- Business Cards, 1968
- Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, 1968
- Crackers, 1969
- Real Estate Opportunities, 1970
- Babycakes, 1970
- A Few Palm Trees, 1971
- Records, 1971
- Dutch Details, 1971
- Colored People, 1972