Ed Ruscha - 'Pop Artist'

Ed Ruscha is an American artist associated with the Pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. In this blog post I am looking at Rusha's paintings.

Born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, Edward Ruscha moved to Oklahoma City in 1941 and to Los Angeles in 1956 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. 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’ at the Pasadena Art Museum. This exhibition is historically considered one of the first ‘Pop Art ‘ exhibitions in America.


He had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. At the start of the seventies, Ruscha began showing his work with the Leo Castelli in New York. He currently shows with the Gagosian Gallery in New York, Beverly Hills and London. Ruscha has consistently combined the cityscape of Los Angeles with vernacular language to communicate a particular urban experience. Encompassing photography, drawing, painting, and artist books, Ruscha's work holds the mirror up to the banality of urban life and give order to the barrage of mass media-fed images and information that confront us daily. Ruscha's early career as a graphic artist continues to strongly influence his aesthetic and thematic approach.

Ruscha has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives, which have travelled worldwide, beginning in 1983 with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2000. In 2001, Ruscha was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member of the Department of Art. The following year a major exhibition of Ruscha's entire body of work opened in Spain at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.

In 2004, The Whitney Museum of American Art organized two simultaneous exhibitions: Cotton Puffs, Q-tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha, which travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and then to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and Ed Ruscha and Photography. Also in 2004, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney mounted a selection of the artist's photographs, paintings, books and drawings that travelled to the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome and to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Another exhibition of Ruscha's photographs was organized for the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2006. Ruscha was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. In 2009, the Hayward Gallery, London mounted a retrospective of the artist's paintings.

1958 1938

1959 Sweetwater

1960 Fulcher Frew

1962 Heavy Industry

1963 Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas

1964 Falling Chiclets

1965 N.Y.

1966 Chemical

1967 Broken Glass

1968 Lawn

1969 Bowling Ball, Olive

1974 Cotton Puffs

1980 Big Dipper

1983 Strength

1984 Untitled (Earth and Scallions)

1986 Dry Gulch

1987 Pattern of Lust

1990 Exit

1991 Inferno

1992 Blue Collar Tires

Frank Lobdell - part 2

The second of two posts on Abstract Expressionist painter Frank Lobdell features works from the second half of his career. See part 1 for earlier works and biographical information on Lobdell.

1972 Untitled Drawing X

1972 Untitled Drawing XI

1972 Untitled Drawing XVI

1980 Dance V

1989 Untitled, Summer

1990 4.17.90

1994  2.21.94 - 3.1.94 - 3.19.94 Bleeker

1994 5.23.94 Bleeker

1994  5.31.94 - 6.30.94 Bleeker

1995  10.2.95 - 11.3.95 Bleeker

2001 Pier 70 Summer I

2002 Pier 70 Fall I

2002 Pier 70 Spring I

2002 Pier 70 Winter I

2002 Pier 70 Winter II

2003 Fall I Francisco Street

2003 Fall II Francisco Street

2003 Summer III

2003 Summer II

2003 Winter I Francisco Street

Frank Lobdell - part 1

Frank Lobdell by David Tomb 2002

The first of two posts on Abstract Expressionist painter Frank Lobdell covers the first half of his career, when his work was more abstracted. The second post will cover his more structured and formalised work.
 
Frank Lobdell was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1921 and studied with Cameron Booth at the St Paul School of Fine Arts. From 1942 until 1946 Lobdell saw active service in Europe during World War II. He then attended the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) from 1947-50, where he studied with Richard Diebenkorn, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko. Lobdell returned to teach at CSFA in 1957, then joined the Stanford University faculty in 1966, retiring after 25 years.

Although his work falls into the genre of abstraction, Lobdell's interest in anthropomorphic shapes, pre-Christian iconography, fertility symbols, and his references to textile designs and primitive art are persistent throughout his works. In this sense, his painting shares a strong affinity with certain aspects of surrealism, specifically as practiced by Picasso, Miró, and Klee - one of the most pivotal moments in Lobdell's artistic development occurred when he saw Guernica at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1940.

Lobdell's early paintings from the late forties and fifties are dark and powerful abstractions. After World War II Lobdell struggled with the effect of war on the psyche. These paintings, in the words of Herschel Chipp, represent the "agony of a human organism confronted with an environment that offers little that is certain—no horizon, no gravity, no substance." Many of the works contain specific iconographic symbols and mark the beginning of a carefully cultivated personal symbology that Lobdell would return to throughout his career.

In the sixties and seventies, Lobdell began to move away from gestural abstraction and started to explore the possibilities inherent in representation with the introduction of more literal figures. In the early seventies he completed a group of paintings entitled the Dance series. These nine paintings, plus several others represent Lobdell's vehement opposition to the Vietnam War, as well as the horrors of the proceeding thirty years, but also mark the end of his early, more literal work and the beginning of an ongoing exploration of space and colour. Over the last couple of decades, Lobdell has continued to pare down his imagery, and colour has taken on a primary importance.

Frank Lobdell is a recipient of the Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Painting from the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters. He has been the subject of museum retrospectives at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's Legion of Honor and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon. His work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA; Oakland Museum of California; San Jose Museum of Art; and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon. In 2003, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Hudson Hills Press published Frank Lobdell: The Art of Making and Meaning, a 400–page monograph charting Lobdell's work and career.

1948 1 August 1948

1948 17 February 1948

1949 1 January 1949

1949 27 October 1949

1954 July 1954

1958 December

1962 3 October 1962

1962 15 April 1962

1962 Black Edge II

1962 Summer

1962 Summer

1963 Dark Presence III, Yellow

1967 Summer (In Memory of James Budd Dixon)

1969 Dance I

1970 Dance IV

1970 Dance VII

1971 Dance VIII

1971 Untitled

1972 Untitled Drawing

1972 Untitled Drawing VIII