Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:
As Warhol was patron saint of the New York night, Ed Ruscha is the quintessential artist of Los Angeles and its heartbreaking light. His paintings, books, photographs, films, and works on paper — made with ingredients as disparate as gunpowder, sulfuric acid, chocolate, urine, Pepto-Bismol, tobacco, and rose petals — could only come from someone who embodies L.A.’s glamour and chaos, its self-consciousness and banal hopes. Peter Plagens once described Los Angeles as “all flesh and no soul, all buildings and no architecture, all property and no land, all electricity and no light, all billboards and nothing to say, all ideas and no principles,” a sentiment that Ruscha — 85 years old and still a dreamboat — both embraces and turns on its head.
Consider three works by this multidisciplinary genius of Pop Conceptualism, now on display at “Now Then,” a career-spanning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. One of his masterpieces, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, epitomizes Sol LeWitt’s observation that successful works of art are often “ludicrously simple.”
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