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拍品專文
An iconic, early example of the highly coveted mountain paintings that the artist began several decades ago, Ed Ruscha’s Career Sportswear is a majestic painting from this celebrated series. A dramatic, snow-capped mountain peak has been rendered in meticulous detail, where high, wispy clouds come in and out of focus. Here, the thin mountain air and extreme weather at the peak are the unlikely backdrop for what Ruscha calls “the drama of words.” The enigmatic phrase CAREER SPORTSWEAR is writ large, announcing itself by means of bold, authoritative lettering in a crisp, white script. Like something out of a dream or movie, the text beckons the viewer into this evocative and beautiful realm. The meaning of the phrase is taken from advertising clichés of a bygone era, used to market an “active lifestyle” to consumers in magazines and newspapers. It is this uncanny blend—blatant commercialism combined with the sublimity of history painting—that makes the mountain paintings so well-received. Seen in this light, Career Sportswear is a subtle riff off a grand tradition.
Rendered with almost photographic precision, the painting showcases Ruscha’s acute technical skill, especially in the diaphanous white clouds that seem to be forming and dissolving before our very eyes. In the present work, Ruscha’s mountain peak has more in common with the famous logo of the Paramount Studio in Hollywood than with the large-scale, awe-inducing landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. Here, Ruscha’s signature script, which he famously dubbed “boy scout utility modern,” is rendered in all-caps. The whiteness of the words fades into each wisp of cloud, blurring the divide between background and foreground. In Career Sportswear, Ruscha has superimposed the two genres of landscape painting and word art, yielding a surrealist encounter that continues to provoke and delight in the nearly three decades since its creation.
When they first appeared, Ruscha’s mountain paintings were seen as a new departure. They had a certain visual “snap” heretofore not seen in his previous work. They demonstrated an amazing verisimilitude, showcasing a new level of technical draftsmanship that had previously lain dormant in his work. They also possessed a staggering beauty that stopped people in their tracks. Collectors and critics alike gravitated to the mountain paintings, such that today, over a dozen examples are included in prestigious museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Tate, London.
To create the present work, Ruscha used a time-consuming, meticulous process that could span several weeks and months. He began by spraying an initial layer of acrylic paint onto the canvas, and then slowly worked up the image over time. This yielded a flawless surface, one that conveys a photographic rendering of deep recessional space, but that also remains resolutely flat, almost like a thin scrim. The impossibility of these two aspects, coexisting within a single picture, was a virtuosic feat that offered another level of complexity to the already multifaceted image.
Embedded with the weight of history, Ruscha’s mountain paintings take as their departure point the sublime landscape paintings of Albert Bierstadt and Caspar David Friedrich. In Ruscha’s hands, however, there are subtle techniques that play off that grand tradition, instead subverting it and revealing it to be a rather hollowed-out cliché. Ruscha has explained that he was interested in “notions of mountains rather than real mountains” (quoted in K. Brougher, in Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, exh. cat., Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, 2016, p. 44). Indeed, Ruscha manages to both acknowledge and subvert the collective understanding of the romantic, heroic mountain peak in Career Sportswear.
Rendered with almost photographic precision, the painting showcases Ruscha’s acute technical skill, especially in the diaphanous white clouds that seem to be forming and dissolving before our very eyes. In the present work, Ruscha’s mountain peak has more in common with the famous logo of the Paramount Studio in Hollywood than with the large-scale, awe-inducing landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. Here, Ruscha’s signature script, which he famously dubbed “boy scout utility modern,” is rendered in all-caps. The whiteness of the words fades into each wisp of cloud, blurring the divide between background and foreground. In Career Sportswear, Ruscha has superimposed the two genres of landscape painting and word art, yielding a surrealist encounter that continues to provoke and delight in the nearly three decades since its creation.
When they first appeared, Ruscha’s mountain paintings were seen as a new departure. They had a certain visual “snap” heretofore not seen in his previous work. They demonstrated an amazing verisimilitude, showcasing a new level of technical draftsmanship that had previously lain dormant in his work. They also possessed a staggering beauty that stopped people in their tracks. Collectors and critics alike gravitated to the mountain paintings, such that today, over a dozen examples are included in prestigious museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Tate, London.
To create the present work, Ruscha used a time-consuming, meticulous process that could span several weeks and months. He began by spraying an initial layer of acrylic paint onto the canvas, and then slowly worked up the image over time. This yielded a flawless surface, one that conveys a photographic rendering of deep recessional space, but that also remains resolutely flat, almost like a thin scrim. The impossibility of these two aspects, coexisting within a single picture, was a virtuosic feat that offered another level of complexity to the already multifaceted image.
Embedded with the weight of history, Ruscha’s mountain paintings take as their departure point the sublime landscape paintings of Albert Bierstadt and Caspar David Friedrich. In Ruscha’s hands, however, there are subtle techniques that play off that grand tradition, instead subverting it and revealing it to be a rather hollowed-out cliché. Ruscha has explained that he was interested in “notions of mountains rather than real mountains” (quoted in K. Brougher, in Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, exh. cat., Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, 2016, p. 44). Indeed, Ruscha manages to both acknowledge and subvert the collective understanding of the romantic, heroic mountain peak in Career Sportswear.