EDWARD RUSCHA: EDITIONS 1959 – 1999
CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ
Ed [Edward] Ruscha, Siri Enberg, Kathy Halbreich,
Clive Phillpot
Ed [Edward] Ruscha, Siri Enberg, Kathy Halbreich, Clive Phillpot: EDWARD RUSCHA: EDITIONS 1959 – 1999 CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1999. First edition. Quartos. Two volumes in printed paper covered boards enclosed inside a black cloth slipcase with Photographically illustrated dust wrapper. 128 pp. & 155 pp. 325 color and 75 black and white illustrations. Index, bibliography and exhibition history. Rear wrapper panel with one faint crease. Adhesive for the cloth covered slipcase slightly loosening at top edge. Other than these two trivial defects, an exceptionally clean set of great utility. A pair of fine copies housed in a nearly fine example of the Publishers slipcase and Obi wrapper.
[2] 10.25 x 12. 25 hardcover books with 155 and 128 pages respectively, and 325 color and 75 black and white illustrations, published on the occasion of the 1999 exhibition Edward Ruscha: Editions 1959-1999 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (thence traveled to other venues). First edition, first and only printing. Volume One with approximately 400 four-color and black-and-white reproductions, a complete catalogue of Ruscha's print work, artist's books and other works. Volume Two with numerous four-color and black-and-white plates and reference illustrations, a foreword by Kathy Halbreich, essays by Siri Engberg and Clive Phillpot, "The Information Man" by Edward Ruscha, a detailed key to the catalogue compiled by Siri Engberg (including edition size, proofs, inscriptions, printer, publisher and print run information), a bibliography, exhibition history and title and subject indexes.
From the publisher: “For 40 years, Edward Ruscha has been an influential voice in postwar American painting as well as one of contemporary art's most significant graphic artists. From his first prints and artist's books made in the early 1960s to his latest projects, Ruscha has created a body of editioned work that is uniquely American in both subject and sensibility. He first began making prints in the late 1950s, and produced his first lithograph in 1962, which was soon followed by his landmark book, Twenty-six Gasoline Stations. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Ruscha continued to publish similar books, filled with photographs depicting commonplace items or locations that commented on the sterility and anonymity of the Los Angeles landscape. These works are now considered pivotal in the history of the contemporary artist's book.”
“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. — Calvin Tomkins