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property from the collection of DAKIS JOANNOU EDWARD RUSCHA (b. 1937) UNTITLED signed, titled an...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:1,000,000.00 - 1,500,000.00 USD
property from the collection of DAKIS JOANNOU EDWARD RUSCHA (b. 1937) UNTITLED signed, titled an...
property from the collection of DAKIS JOANNOU EDWARD RUSCHA (b. 1937) UNTITLED signed, titled and dated "'Untitled' 1963 RUSCHA" on the stretcher inscribed "NOISE" along the left and right edges oil on canvas 67 x 72 in. (170.2 x 183 cm) painted in 1963 Estimate: - $1,000,000-1,500,000 PROVENANCE Leo Castelli Gallery, NEW YORK Owen Morrissey Collection of Leo Castelli, NEW YORK EXHIBITED LOS ANGELES, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1963 NEW YORK, Leo Castelli Gallery, 1974 BUFFALO, Albright-Knox Gallery, PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS, AND OTHER WORK BY ED RUSCHA, June 8-July 11, 1976 BOSTON, Thomas Segal Gallery, 1977 ATHENS, Athens School of Fine Arts, EVERYTHING THAT'S INTERESTING IS NEW: THE DAKIS JOANNOU COLLECTION, January 20-April 20, 1996 LITERATURE Snedaker, THE POP THAT POOPED, 1971, p. 20 (illustrated) A. Hindry, ed., CLAUDE BERRI MEETS LEO CASTELLI, PARIS, 1990, p. 123 (illustrated) P. Anbinder, ed., THE WORKS OF EDWARD RUSCHA, SAN FRANCISCO, 1982, p. 16 (illustrated) Barnes, ed., THE 20th CENTURY ART BOOK, 1996, p. 402 (illustrated) J. Deitch, EVERYTHING THAT'S INTERESTING IS NEW: THE DAKIS JOANNOU COLLECTION, 1996, p. 233 (illustrated) Like many artists associated with the rise of Pop art in the early 1960s, Edward Ruscha struggled with ambivalent feelings towards Abstract Expressionism. Explaining his search for an alternative form of visual communication at this time, Ruscha has stated that, "I began to see that the only thing to do would be a preconceived image. It was an enormous freedom to be premeditated about my art. I wanted to make pictures but I didn't want paint. Some painters just love paint-they get up in the morning and grab a brush, not knowing what they are going to do, but they just have to have that hot brush moving those colors. But I was more interested in the end result than I was in the means to an end." (Quoted in N. Benezra, "Ed Ruscha: Painting and Artistic License," Ed Ruscha, Washington, DC, 2000, p. 146.) To achieve such a premeditated end, Ruscha drew upon his substantial training as a commercial artist and his related facility with typography. By 1963 he had produced several groundbreaking word paintings, including the present work, that pushed even the vanguard Pop movement into uncharted conceptual territory. In its striking use of typography, the present work is clearly indebted to the paintings of Jasper Johns, which Ruscha first encountered in reproduction in 1957, and later at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Responding to the elder artist's use of numbers, letters and words, Ruscha incorporated these same elements into his own paintings, fusing their inherent flatness with the planar surfaces of his canvases. Although highly accomplished in their own right, Ruscha's first word paintings derived their typographies from popular culture, and thus remained linked to the Pop paintings of his contemporaries. In Actual Size, for example, Ruscha reproduced the fat, pink, bubble letters that appear on the labels of Spam cans. Similarly, in Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, the artist faithfully painted the cinematic banner for 20th Century Fox onto a massive canvas. In 1963, when Ruscha created the present work, the artist daringly parted ways with many of his Pop peers. Although he retained the typographic styles that are common to popular culture, Ruscha now spelled out abstract concepts in his paintings. The word "NOISE," for example, does not refer to a corporate brand or trademark, but simply describes an aural phenomenon. A similar tactic was used the same year for Electric, which also emblazons a generalized idea across a canvas. By rejecting recognizable labels and logos, Ruscha squeezed every last ounce of illusionism from his paintings and replaced it with the sheer flatness of language, the insubstantiality of pure ideas. Moreover, Ruscha often chose words that described invisible forces, as in the present work. But by spelling them out in bold, highly stylized typographies, the artist lent these intangible concepts a surprising degree of presence. Kerry Brougher has described these cunning linguistic transformations as follows: "Between 1961 and 1964, Ruscha produced a series of monosyllabic word paintings such as Boss, Ace, and Electric. These bold, brash paintings clearly undercut Abstract Expressionism by embracing language and using words to create an image.... The words in Ruscha's paintings resist linguistic interpretation and occupy the paintings like objects, though equivocal ones. Thus the work, in sum, represents a kind of willed muteness. Fragments of reality that have been mostly spotted from the window of the artist's car, these words, when hung together, read almost like signposts along a highway, a landscape seen through the windshield. While Ruscha was making these word paintings he was 'still struggling with the plastic problems of painting. That had a lot to do with the horizontal. When you think about it, words are really horizontal objects. You're almost making a landscape.' Ruscha's words hover between the flat, transversal surfaces of the graphic artist and the longitudinal, deep-space world of landscape painting, a semi-abstract cartoon wonderland in which words are quite recognizable but have become confused with objects in perspective." (K. Brougher, "Words as Landscape," Ed Ruscha, Washington, DC, 2000, p. 161.)
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