I am a big Ed Ruscha fan, (and idolized Kerouac in high school) so naturally this drew my attention today from ArtDaily.org:
 

NEW YORK, NY.- In 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road on his typewriter as a continuous 120 foot-long scroll, feverishly recording in twenty days his experiences during road trips in the United States and Mexico, which he began with Neil Cassady in the late 1940s. On the Road was finally published in 1957, and Kerouac was immediately acknowledged as the voice of the Beat Generation, a new group of writers, including Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, who became known for their embracing of radical free-verse style.

Ed Ruscha’s singular art has recorded the shifting emblems of American life in the form of Hollywood logos, stylized gas stations, and archetypal landscapes. His wry choice of words and indirect phrases mines the perpetual interplay between language as a physical thing and language as a transparent medium. During the sixties, he created a series of cheaply printed photographic books as deadpan meditations on the romantic vision of the road epitomized by the Beats. His typologies of the urban environment of Los Angeles included Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963) and Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). In Royal Road Test (1967), he brought the word and the road together in a conceptual prank by documenting himself dropping a vintage typewriter from a speeding Buick.

Over the last couple of years, Ruscha has turned his attention to On the Road, resulting in his own version of Kerouac’s Beat bible. Kerouac’s entire text appears accompanied by black and white photographic illustrations that Ruscha has either taken himself, commissioned from other photographers, or selected from found images to refer closely to the details and impressions that the author describes, from car parts to jazz instruments, from sandwich stacks to tire burns on a desert road……

 
Read the complete article here:
Gagosian to Present Ed Ruscha’s Artist Book of a Classic Novel by Jack Kerouac

I have quickly grown fond of the ArtKnowledgeNews blog and illustrated email delivery, highly recommended for art lovers in southern California hungry for a well-rounded global perspective on the world of art.

LOS ANGELES, CA.- This exhibition includes works by Sam Francis, Shane Guffogg, David Hockney, Wassily Kandinsky, Minjung Kim, André Masson, Henry Moore, Robert Motherwell, Jules Pascin, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Larry Rivers, Ed Ruscha, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Andy Warhol. The exhibition is generally divided between works by European masters, from impressionism through the mid twentieth century, and American masters from then onward to the present day. The schematic of the show is similarly organized, with geographically discrete groupings installed in four areas of the gallery. On exhibition at Leslie Sacks Fine Art from 14 November through 21 December, 2009.

Roy Lichenstein at Leslie Sacks, Los Angeles

Read the full article on Art Knowledge News.

Visit Leslie Sacks Fine Art online and in person 11640 San Vicente Boulevard , Los Angeles, CA 90049

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*GREAT* thoughtful write-up by Christopher Knight of the LA Times –

Cartoons have been art's most common language going on 50 years, ever since Roy Lichtenstein painted Mickey Mouse and Edward Ruscha conjured Little Orphan Annie.

Make that 140 years if you believe (as I do) that the brushy, broken, unfinished-surface look of Impressionist paintings derived from the oil sketches that artists of the French Academy used to map out the slick, highly finished surfaces of their often grandiose canvases. They called those preparatory sketches cartoons, and the Impressionists latched onto their raw energy.

Two small museum shows put current cartoons in our sights. In different ways, both use the form as a method to consider ancient texts.

The more bracing of the two is “The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb's Book of Genesis” at the UCLA Hammer Museum. Robert Crumb spent nearly five years thinking about and drawing 206 sheets to illuminate the first book of the Old Testament — chapter by chapter, scene by scene — inside rectilinear panels (as many as six per sheet) whose wavy contours frame events with nervous visual energy. At the Hammer, the sheets are lined up edge to edge around one gallery, as well as around a circular wall built in the center of the room.

As a general rule manuscript illumination has long-since gone the way of lighthearted children's books. Crumb, however, takes on the daunting task with a fierce intelligence and the graphic skill one expects from a founding father of the radical underground comics movement. (His first issue of the counterculture masterwork, Zap Comix, was published in San Francisco in 1968.) Crumb's familiar drawing style — black ink, a tremulous line, dense cross-hatching that darkens the field and electrifies the light through contrast — gives Genesis the punch of a heavy graphic novel……

Engaging a master of the profane like Crumb to tell a sacred story could have proven to be a wincing gimmick, but he's too good an artist for that. Crumb announces in a hand-lettered forward that he's not a believer in the divinity of the Bible's authorship, and that sense of human origins is conveyed by his distinctive drawing style. (He used Robert Alter's 1996 English translation of the Pentateuch, plus the King James Version.) The invigorating result is the restoration of historical literary and artistic power to a world-changing narrative.

The same cannot be said for “Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India's Comics” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show is certainly fun, even lighthearted, but it's also lightweight.

Modern Indian comic books are paired with manuscripts chosen from the museum's collection and dating from the Mughal empire. (Most came to LACMA from the great Paul F. Walter and Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck collections.) The connections between new comics and old manuscripts are largely narrative — the Ramayana, for example, an ancient Hindu epic told in classical paintings in opaque watercolor and adapted today by Liquid Comics, a company based in Bangalore but employing digital collaboration in Los Angeles and New York……

–Christopher Knight

Please visit the Los Angeles Times online to read this entire article.

Photos: R. Crumb, Sodom and Noah's Ark, “Book of Genesis,” Credit: UCLA Hammer Museum; Greg Horn, “Devi,” 2006, Credit: LACMA

“The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb's Book of Genesis,” UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. Tue., Wed., Fri., Sat. 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thu. 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sun. 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

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More on Ed Rusha in the moment from ArtDaily.org.

LONDON.- This autumn, the Hayward Gallery presents a major retrospective of Ed Ruscha’s paintings, in celebration of his 50-year career. Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) is widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential artists at work today and this exhibition traces the development of his paintings across five decades, from his contributions to Pop Art in the early 1960s to his paintings comprising words and phrases and his explorations of iconic American landscapes.

Detail of Ed Ruscha's Back of Hollywood

Read the original:
Major Retrospective of Ed Ruscha’s Paintings at the Hayward Gallery

More good stuff from artdaily.org on Ed Ruscha:

LONDON.- In 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road on his typewriter as a continuous 120 foot-long scroll, feverishly recording in twenty days his experiences during road trips in the United States and Mexico, which he began with Neil Cassady in the late 1940s. On the Road was finally published in 1957, and Kerouac was immediately acknowledged as the voice of the Beat Generation, a new group of writers, including Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, who became known for their embracing of radical free-verse style. Ed Ruscha’s singular art has recorded the shifting emblems of American life in the form of Hollywood logos, stylized gas stations, and archetypal landscapes.

Read the original here:
Gagosian Presents an Exhibition of Selected Illustrated Spreads by Ed Ruscha

Great article on the Obama’s White House art remodel from the London Times via post-thing.net

From the London Times Online comes a list of artworks borrowed by the Obama White House from museums and galleries in the Washington D.C. littoral. Here’s the text, with interspersed online images:

A cultural revolution is under way at the White House, where the Obamas are decorating their living quarters with modern and abstract artwork.

Out have gone traditional landscapes, portraits and still life paintings. In have come new pieces by contemporary African-American and Native American artists, with bold colours, odd shapes and squiggly lines.

Works by big names from the modern art world such as Jasper Johns and Mark Rothko rub shoulders with lesser-known artists such as Alma Thomas, an African-American abstract painter of the 1960s and 1970s.

Ed Ruscha in the White House

Read the London Times article on the Obama’s White House art choices.

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When he was director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Henry T. Hopkins gave the green light to the first major retrospective of Ed Ruscha's paintings. The show, which traveled the U.S. and Canada in 1982 and 1983, was instrumental in securing Ruscha's reputation as a critically important artist — both for Los Angeles, where he began to attract attention as a promising newcomer around 1959, and for a 1980s art world that was just on the cusp of going global.

Hopkins, who died over the weekend at 81, was instrumental in developing L.A.'s art scene. As an educator and a museum director, he was around in the 1960s as the cultural scene began to take off and again after 1986, when he returned from museum jobs in Texas and the Bay Area and L.A. became a powerhouse.

Among my favorite Hopkins stories is a rather harrowing one that concerns Ruscha. Hopkins bought one of the artist's first word-paintings not long after it was made, a transitional 1959 canvas called “Sweetwater.” He paid $200, arranging a $10-a-month payment plan with the young, then-little-known painter…..

– Christopher Knight

Related content:

Henry T. Hopkins dies at 81; painter and museum director had formative role in L.A. art scene

Photo: Henry T. Hopkins with two Ed Ruscha paintings in the background. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Read the entire artice here:
Henry Hopkins and the ‘lost’ Ed Ruscha

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Former San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) director Henry T. Hopkins passed away on September 27, 2009. During his twelve-year tenure (1974–86), Hopkins sought to establish SFMOMA as the West Coast’s premier museum of twentieth-century art through a deliberate plan of accelerated activity, determining new directions for both the exhibition program and the permanent collection and launching the museum on a course of renewed excitement and expansion. “Hopkins’s leadership at SFMOMA was distinguished by outstanding intellect and creative vision,” says Neal Benezra, SFMOMA director. “In addition to organizing important exhibitions—including Ed Ruscha’s first museum

More:
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Former Director Henry T. Hopkins Dies