THE WORKS OF EDWARD RUSCHA
[I DON’T WANT NO RETROSPECTIVE]
Dave Hickey, Peter Plagens [essays],
Anne Livet & Henry T. Hopkins [introductions]
Dave Hickey, Peter Plagens [essays], Anne Livet [introduction], and Henry T. Hopkins [introduction]: THE WORKS OF EDWARD RUSCHA. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982. First edition. Quarto. Embossed [I don’t want no retro spective] yellow cloth with gilt to spine. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Printed endpapers: maps of Oklahoma City and Los Angeles respectively. 182 pp. 62 color plates. Nine gatefolds. 150 duotone and black and white illustrations. Glossy jacket faintly rubbed, otherwise a fine copy in a fine dust jacket.
10.5 x 10.125 hard cover book with 182 pages, including essays, 62 color plates, nine gatefolds, and 150 duotone and black and white illustrations. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [March 25 – May 23, 1982]; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York [July 8 – September 5, 1982]; Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia, Canada [October 4 – November 28, 1982]; The San Antonio Museum of Art [December 27, 1982 – February 20, 1983]; Los Angeles County Museum of Art [March 17 – May 15, 1983].
Includes a Chronology, Biography of Exhibitions, Selected Bibliography, Checklist of the Exhibition, and Index.
“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