Word pictures

Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting
Hayward Gallery, until 10 January 2010

Apparently, Ed Ruscha (born 1937 and pronounced Rew-shay) is widely considered one of the world’s most influential living artists. American, he has been based in Los Angeles all his working life, and is much indebted to the strategies and formal devices of film-making. Reference books tend to call him a Pop artist, in recognition of his interest in popular culture, and his exploitation of branding and presentation. (An early painting features one of those distinctive red boxes of raisins smashed flat to the picture plane.) His admirers want to distance him now from the Pop label and talk about conceptual art and surrealism. Ruscha sees himself as ‘a combination of abstract artist and someone who deals with subject matter’.

He is one of those artists whose work reproduces supremely well, so much so that the principal reason to experience his paintings in the flesh is to gain an idea of their size, which is usually on the scale of the billboard or cinema screen. Once that basic fact has been registered, there are few more painterly pleasures to be absorbed from these large, bland pictures. In some ways, you get the measure and excitement of Ruscha’s work best from books and catalogues. I wondered why we had never seen a big show of his work here (though there was a Serpentine retrospective in 1990), and now I know.

Walking round the cavernous, art-inhospitable spaces of the Hayward, I particularly enjoyed his early paintings. His beginnings in impasto and collage were soon swapped for the unaccented ‘brush-less’ surface, and the work became dominated by his lifelong passion for typography and the print media. It’s evident that his greatest theme is words, though he’s good on petrol stations and quite keen on mountains. A quintessential early painting is ‘Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights’ (1962), a homage to 20th Century Fox and the diagonal, and a new take on sign-writing. It still looks good, as indeed do the burning gas stations, but the viewer is not exactly delayed by a plethora of painterly qualities, of surface or mark, densities of pigment or subtleties of colour. These paintings are largely uninflected, the lettering supplying the chief incident or event in an otherwise quietly painted and schematic composition.

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