Edward Ruscha designed the poster for the 1962 Pasadena Art Museum exhibition, New Painting of Common Objects, curated by the legendary Walter Hopps. Designing the landmark poster and being included in the exhibition (where he sold his first work of art!) was a defining moment for Ruscha. He also had the opportunity to exhibit alongside future famous artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
This groundbreaking exhibition is often considered the starting point of Pop Art in the United States. It featured artists from a wide range of backgrounds. Wayne Thiebaud, for example, was a teacher at the University of California. Roy Lichtenstein, Phillip Hefferton and Robert Dowd had previously worked in the style of Abstract Expressionism. Jim Dine was involved with Happenings in New York, where Andy Warhol was a successful commercial artist but not yet an established painter, printmaker or filmmaker. The youngest members of the ‘Common Objects’ artists were high school friends Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode, aged 24 and 25, who had recently left art school and were still supporting themselves with graphic design work and odd jobs. These days Ruscha worked as a layout artist for an advertising agency in Los Angeles.
We have a facsimile of the famous poster in our collection, reproduced at its original dimensions of 36 x 24 inches (91.5 x 61 cm). It was produced under licence from Ed Ruscha by the original exhibition venue, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. We mounted the poster and framed in dark wood. It is protected by UV-blocking Plexiglass (acrylic), ready to hang on your wall.
Excerpts from an interview with Edward Ruscha in 1980 and 1981. The interview was conducted by Paul Karlstrom for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
MR. KARLSTROM: […] So you were in the Pasadena show in 1962, and a painting was sold from them. Would you really mark that, along with the Warhol show, as an introduction of what was called “Pop” at the time, but what became known as Pop Art?
MR. RUSCHA: Well, yes, historically it is. Walter’s was the first of any organized show of that kind of work. Walter just chose to call it “New Painting of Common Objects”. I even like the way he said it, just his words coming out of his mouth. He had a way of nailing a subject down, and I thought that was really good, the way he defined it as the “New Painting of Common Objects.”
[…]
MR. KARLSTROM: […] There’s a description here of attitudes that then made possible what we call Pop Art, dealing with Pop culture as a legitimate art alternative. Do you feel what he said there reflects your own view?
MR. RUSCHA: I’ve always felt that there have always been Pop artists in all ages. The term Pop Art made me nervous and ambivalent, and not understanding my position in this new so- called movement which was defined by, who knows–maybe, was it Richard Hamilton?
MR. KARLSTROM: I think Alloway gets credit for the term.
MR. RUSCHA: It could be. I originally did not know about this word Pop Art in the art phenomenon sense of it until later, but I guess it was Walter Hopps who first made a definition of the kind of art that was being produced at that time. He used the term, “new painting of common objects,” when we see it actually goes beyond painting. It was culture, and it was so many other modes of making art that I guess I first responded to this term “common objects.” The use of common objects, and so the word “Pop Art” was only a popularized public catchword which was used and misunderstood by many people. Anybody’s use of Pop Art is okay with me, it always was. And if you speak of Pop Art meaning artists, the artists who are producing paintings, drawings that had to do with common objects, that’s one thing.
But on a public level, I think that Pop Art was never truly understood. It was meant to encompass movies, it was meant to encompass the car culture, it was meant to include all these things that had nothing to do with the museum type of art. So there was a broad usage of it, and there was a defined, more refined usage of it, too. I never truly understood whether I was a member of this movement or not. On the surface I was, because I used popular imagery. I used imagery from commercial sources, and imagery that was not usually associated, or was not usually meant to be cloudy and poetic and sensitive, and I used subjects that came from a less thoughtful side of life, a more decadent side of life, something that was not born out of a true poetic background.
