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拍品专文
Painted during a pivotal year for the artist, a period during which he completed some of his most iconic works, Ed Ruscha’s Marble Shatters Drinking Glass represents the pinnacle of his enigmatic, surreal, and technically brilliant paintings of the 1960s. In the present work, the artist challenges the narrative foundations of art by assembling an array of objects—a shattered tumbler, shards of flying glass, and a multi-colored marble—in a manner that suggests a dramatic narrative, but—tantalizingly—without satisfying it. By painting in this manner, Ruscha directs attention towards the forms themselves, particularly their sculptural qualities, a quality that would become a central pillar of the artist’s oeuvre. Painted the same year he completed Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1965-1968, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.), Marble Shatters Drinking Glass takes its place amongst the pantheon of Ruscha’s work.
Set against one of the artist’s signature gradated backdrops, Ruscha paints a shattered glass tumbler and an errant marble. Seemingly captured the split second after contact between the two has resulted in shards of flying glass, this canvas successfully showcases not only the artist’s superlative technical skills as a painter, but also his lifelong interest in how we look at, and perceive, objects. The skill with which he renders not only the subject matter, but also the ambiguity of the events surrounding what is being depicted on the surface of the canvas, is something which is unique to Ruscha during this period. “I like to give attention to the lonely paintbrush,” Ruscha once said, and it is with paintings such as the present work that his skills are on full display (quoted by A. Schwartz, “A History Without Words,” in J. Ellroy, ed., Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2010, p. 29).
Marble Shatters Drinking Glass was executed during a period when Ruscha spent much of his time perfecting his “word” paintings. Alongside these, Ruscha also began to investigate paintings without words; the result was a series of four works in which the subject was a glass in various stages of destruction. In a nod to nostalgia, some of the glasses contain milk, a throwback—like Andy Warhol’s cans of tomato soup—to a notion of American wholesomeness, something at odds with the destructive nature of the subject matter. Many of the objects came from his own studio, and were often chosen because of the challenges they presented to the artist as he sought to depict these static objects in a more dynamic way. While other artists of the 1960s, such as Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, sought to “flatten” the world as they saw it, Ruscha was relishing the challenges of representing the opposite point of view. “While Ruscha remained committed to two-dimensional media in his own practice, his tendency to imbue subjects with a convincing sense of volumetric dimensionality betrays a surprisingly sculptural approach” (A. Torok, “Torn, Poured, Discarded,” in C. Cherix, et. al. Ed Ruscha/Now Then, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2023, p. 102).
Drawing visual parallels to the bizarre floating objects of Surrealists like René Magritte and the metaphysical tableaus of Giorgio de Chirico, Ruscha’s object paintings are both similar and distinct from his textual pieces. The words that he uses come in a variety of typefaces, sizes, and styles, but the objects always allude to illusion and are expertly rendered. To him, words “exist in a world of no-size. Take a word like ‘smash’—we don’t know it by size. We see it on billboards, in four-point type and all stages in between. On the other hand, I found out that it is important for objects to be their actual size in my paintings. If I do a painting of a pencil or magazine or fly or pills, I feel some sort of responsibility to paint them natural size—I get out the ruler” (quoted in P. Failing, “Ruscha, Young Artist,” Art News, April 1982, vol. 81, no. 4, p. 78).
Ultimately, the juxtapositions in works such as Marble Shatters Drinking Glass serve to destabilize our expectations. His non sequitur motifs, unconventional use of color, and meticulous paint application technique seek to raise more questions than they answer. As such, the present work stands as an exemplar of Ruscha’s oeuvre. Its combination of formal elements depicted in informal ways, extends throughout his practice and creates a distinct visual language that informs the artist’s decidedly signature style. These premeditated compositions and juxtapositions of objects, subjects, and ideas are at the core of Ruscha’s practice. Talking about his process, the artist notes, “To generalize, [the Abstract Expressionists] approached their art with no preconceptions and with a certain instant explosiveness, whereas I found that my work had to be planned and preconceived, or rather wondered about, before being done. My subjects tend to be recognizable objects made up of stuff that is non-objective and abstract. I have always operated on a kind of waste-retrieval method. I retrieve and renew things that have been forgotten or wasted” (quoted in B. Brunon, “Interview with Edward Ruscha,” in Edward Ruscha, exh. cat., Musée Saint Pierre Art Contemporain, Lyon, 1985, p. 95).
Set against one of the artist’s signature gradated backdrops, Ruscha paints a shattered glass tumbler and an errant marble. Seemingly captured the split second after contact between the two has resulted in shards of flying glass, this canvas successfully showcases not only the artist’s superlative technical skills as a painter, but also his lifelong interest in how we look at, and perceive, objects. The skill with which he renders not only the subject matter, but also the ambiguity of the events surrounding what is being depicted on the surface of the canvas, is something which is unique to Ruscha during this period. “I like to give attention to the lonely paintbrush,” Ruscha once said, and it is with paintings such as the present work that his skills are on full display (quoted by A. Schwartz, “A History Without Words,” in J. Ellroy, ed., Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2010, p. 29).
Marble Shatters Drinking Glass was executed during a period when Ruscha spent much of his time perfecting his “word” paintings. Alongside these, Ruscha also began to investigate paintings without words; the result was a series of four works in which the subject was a glass in various stages of destruction. In a nod to nostalgia, some of the glasses contain milk, a throwback—like Andy Warhol’s cans of tomato soup—to a notion of American wholesomeness, something at odds with the destructive nature of the subject matter. Many of the objects came from his own studio, and were often chosen because of the challenges they presented to the artist as he sought to depict these static objects in a more dynamic way. While other artists of the 1960s, such as Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, sought to “flatten” the world as they saw it, Ruscha was relishing the challenges of representing the opposite point of view. “While Ruscha remained committed to two-dimensional media in his own practice, his tendency to imbue subjects with a convincing sense of volumetric dimensionality betrays a surprisingly sculptural approach” (A. Torok, “Torn, Poured, Discarded,” in C. Cherix, et. al. Ed Ruscha/Now Then, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2023, p. 102).
Drawing visual parallels to the bizarre floating objects of Surrealists like René Magritte and the metaphysical tableaus of Giorgio de Chirico, Ruscha’s object paintings are both similar and distinct from his textual pieces. The words that he uses come in a variety of typefaces, sizes, and styles, but the objects always allude to illusion and are expertly rendered. To him, words “exist in a world of no-size. Take a word like ‘smash’—we don’t know it by size. We see it on billboards, in four-point type and all stages in between. On the other hand, I found out that it is important for objects to be their actual size in my paintings. If I do a painting of a pencil or magazine or fly or pills, I feel some sort of responsibility to paint them natural size—I get out the ruler” (quoted in P. Failing, “Ruscha, Young Artist,” Art News, April 1982, vol. 81, no. 4, p. 78).
Ultimately, the juxtapositions in works such as Marble Shatters Drinking Glass serve to destabilize our expectations. His non sequitur motifs, unconventional use of color, and meticulous paint application technique seek to raise more questions than they answer. As such, the present work stands as an exemplar of Ruscha’s oeuvre. Its combination of formal elements depicted in informal ways, extends throughout his practice and creates a distinct visual language that informs the artist’s decidedly signature style. These premeditated compositions and juxtapositions of objects, subjects, and ideas are at the core of Ruscha’s practice. Talking about his process, the artist notes, “To generalize, [the Abstract Expressionists] approached their art with no preconceptions and with a certain instant explosiveness, whereas I found that my work had to be planned and preconceived, or rather wondered about, before being done. My subjects tend to be recognizable objects made up of stuff that is non-objective and abstract. I have always operated on a kind of waste-retrieval method. I retrieve and renew things that have been forgotten or wasted” (quoted in B. Brunon, “Interview with Edward Ruscha,” in Edward Ruscha, exh. cat., Musée Saint Pierre Art Contemporain, Lyon, 1985, p. 95).