Overview

The first critical examination of the groundbreaking work of the artist who exemplifies West Coast cool. Ed Ruscha was born in Nebraska and raised in Oklahoma, but he belongs to Los Angeles in a way that few other artists do. Since the 1960s, Ruscha's iconic images of the cityscape and culture of Los Angeles—freeway gas stations, parking lots, palm trees, motels, swimming pools, and billboards—have both reflected and shaped popular perceptions of Hollywood and the city that surrounds it. In Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles, Alexandra Schwartz views Ruscha's groundbreaking early work as a window onto the radically shifting cultural and political landscape in which it was produced. Schwartz examines Ruscha's diverse body of work, including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, books, and films, and discusses his relationship with other artists—including John Altoon, Ed Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston, and Dennis Hopper, all of them associated with the famous Ferus Gallery—with whom he sparked the movement known as West Coast pop. She also explores his links to the mainstream film industry, then evolving into the experimental New Hollywood of the late 1960s and early 1970s; his association with emerging discourse on L.A. architecture and urbanism; and his participation in the politics of the L.A. art world, where his presentation and self-marketing reflected contemporary attitudes toward gender, race, and class. Despite Ruscha's fame, this is the first comprehensive critical consideration of his art, and the first to consider it in the context of L.A.'s tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. It shows how Ruscha, borrowing from and critiquing the methods and myths of Hollywood, forged a new paradigm of the artist as a popular culture scribe—a soothsayer for the entertainment age.

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Reviews

"""Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles is particularly valuable in it's exploration of Ruscha's relationship to Hollywood and influence on late 20th century architectural theory. It's a good read, and should be of interest to anyone concerned with the cultural history of Southern California.""--Lynn Zelevansky, Henry J. Heinz II Director, Carnegie Museum of Art -- Lynn Zelevansky ""Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles is particularly valuable in its exploration of Ruscha's relationship to Hollywood and influence on late-twentieth-century architectural theory. It's a good read, and should be of interest to anyone concerned with the cultural history of Southern California."" Lynn Zelevansky, Henry J. Heinz II Director, Carnegie Museum of Art"

Alexandra Schwartz's very articulate and very precise book on Ed Ruscha's life and work reveals a Ruscha overflowing with insight into the history of modern art and the masters of the avant-garde. The relationship between mass culture and underground culture is explored to great affect. Los Angeles, freedom, and the richness characterized by Ruscha's work make this book the definitive starting point for further appreciations of California Cool. --Catherine Grenier, Exhibition Director, Pompidou Center Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles is particularly valuable in its exploration of Ruscha's relationship to Hollywood and influence on late twentieth century architectural theory. It's a good read, and should be of interest to anyone concerned with the cultural history of Southern California. --Lynn Zelevansky, Henry J. Heinz II Director, Carnegie Museum of Art Ed Ruscha's brilliant work of the 1960s has finally been located in relation to Los Angeles, the city from which it grew. Schwartz argues convincingly that Ruscha's art, especially his films, photographs, and books, ventured into such varied worlds as urban theory, the New Hollywood, and California body culture without ever settling for fixed positions or meanings. Tracing Ruscha's relationships with figures like Dennis Hopper, Denise Scott Brown, Walter Hopps, and Wallace Berman, Schwartz recovers an interlocking set of hip, little-known subcultures. Important, engaging, and eminently readable, with a light touch befitting its elusive, deadpan subject. --Harry Cooper, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Art

Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles is particularly valuable in it's exploration of Ruscha's relationship to Hollywood and influence on late 20th century architectural theory. It's a good read, and should be of interest to anyone concerned with the cultural history of Southern California. --Lynn Zelevansky, Henry J. Heinz II Director, Carnegie Museum of Art -- Lynn Zelevansky Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles is particularly valuable in its exploration of Ruscha's relationship to Hollywood and influence on late-twentieth-century architectural theory. It's a good read, and should be of interest to anyone concerned with the cultural history of Southern California. Lynn Zelevansky, Henry J. Heinz II Director, Carnegie Museum of Art

Author Information

Alexandra Schwartz is the editor of a collection of Ed Ruscha's writings, Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages (MIT Press, 2002) and the coeditor of Modern Women: Women Artists in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art.

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