"I think that there is one fundamental thing, and that is that artists are attracted to glamour, you see. The American way of life possesses a certain siren voice of some kind, which is glamorous to almost any society..."
Radiating above a celestial yet portent cloudy sky, Ed Ruscha’s iconic and enigmatic text–THAT WAS THEN THIS IS NOW–thunders across the canvas, evoking the cinematic climax of the transient instance between past and present. In an arresting theatrical crescendo, Ruscha masterfully elicits a moment of revolution: glowing white sunlight emanates from behind clusters of stormy clouds, dramatically illuminating an ethereal promise of hope and transformation. Ruscha's titular phrase That Was Then This Is Now epitomizes a central conceptual concern of the artist’s practice–the enduring friction between nostalgia and reality, before and after, past and present. Executed in 1989, That Was Then This Is Now belongs to a seminal and limited group of sfumato skies painted between 1988-90, including Hell Heaven and Do Az I Do, which provide a conceptual counterpart to the artist’s earlier burning sunrise-sunset paintings of the 70s and 80s. Through a sibylline sky charged in a paradoxical narrative in which past and present conditions are unknown, That Was Then This Is Now entrances the viewer in an elusive yet eternally resonant notion of the ever-changing realities of human existence. Test.mes nt to the persisting importance of this theme in Ruscha’s practice, the artist’s recent major career retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art paid homage to this theme in its title: Ed Ruscha / Now Then.
"My work can almost come from the sources, while on the inside of me, right from this city here, the imagery can come from almost anywhere in America, you know, it's American. We can both agree that the pictorial goings on in my work are almost always from American sources, and American in subject matter, American in feeling. My work has less to say specifically about this city of Los Angeles, but it's the city that gave all this to me on the inside, and not necessarily on the outside manifestation."
An instantly alluring and mystic phrase, That Was Then This Is Now is a paragon of the conceptual rigor and singular engagement with semiotics that have come to define Ruscha’s imitable practice. In bold articulation, Ruscha’s text confronts the viewer with a phrase that is simultaneously triumphant and nostalgic, commanding attention and inspiring reflection. The present work embodies the best of Ruscha’s most celebrated paintings in which imagery and semantics coalesce in a brilliant visual dialogue, probings the reciprocity between image, symbol, and text. Ruscha’s titular painting further invokes the romantic notions of cinema and a bygone Hollywood era, harkening back to the black-and-white movies that the artist recalls watching during his childhood in Oklahoma City. Through expansive text set against an enigmatic grisaille sky, That Was Then This Is Now suggests a sudden theatrical twist in an old Hollywood celluloid film. Furthermore, Ruscha evokes the age-old cinematic trope of the prophetic sky which appears across cinema as foreshadowing for a narrative turning point.
Large-Scale Ed Ruscha Cloud Paintings
Executed in the artist’s iconic typeface, developed and refined in the 1980s, That Was Then This Is Now alludes to a past and present of which the conditions are decidedly unknown. Following Ruscha’s lauded sunrise-sunset paintings of the 70s and 80s, Ruscha’s cloudy sky backdrops evoke a similar concept of ambiguous transformation. The addition of Ruscha’s arresting text challenges the viewer in a moment of redemption or reckoning, even longing for an earlier t.mes . Ruscha’s titular phrase concretizes this conceptual concern in Ruscha’s oeuvre, foreshadowing its increased importance in the artist’s works of the 90s and beyond. Evincing the present work’s paramount significance, Robert Dean and Lisa Turvey observe in the Catalogue Raisonné entry for the work: “The title phrase prefigures a recurrent ‘before and after’ theme in Ruscha’s work of the next two decades.” (Robert Dean and Lisa Turvey, eds., Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, 1988-1992, Volume Four: 1988-1992, New York 2009, p. 136 )
“The idea of noise, of visual noise, somehow meant something to me, and still means something to me. The idea that you can say a lot in a small given area somehow has always intrigued me, and this seems to be one of the principal guidelines in my work."
Working briefly as a commercial artist following his move to Los Angeles in 1956, Ruscha found inspiration in the prospering advertisement industry, Hollywood, and mid-century American pop culture. He was most famously captivated by the colossal billboards lining America’s Western highways, towering monuments to American consumerism which provided a seemingly endless barrage of text and image in striking mélanges of sign and symbol. The highway billboards would uniquely inform Ruscha’s distinctive visual vernacular and brand of Pop, by which he challenged the semiotic function of the written word through beguiling and idiosyncratic compositions. The appropriation of the commonplace and its subsequent transcendence into Replica Handbags chimes with Pop art's greatest ambassadors such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who worked simultaneously to Ruscha throughout much of the late Twentieth Century, probings the consumer culture as a springboard for artistic expression. That Was Then This is Now harkens back to the cinematic seriality of Warhol’s silkscreens and the hyperbolized drama of Hollywood films in Lichtenstein’s early paintings.
Hollywood as a subject runs throughout Ruscha’s career, famously represented by explorations of the Hollywood signs, such as Back of Hollywood from 1977, which famously features a burning orange, sun-soaked sky–cleverly positioned as either, and possibly both, sunrise and sunset. In 1988-90, Ruscha introduced the cloudy sky, an equally enigmatic and operatic backdrop for his compositions. In That Was Then This Is Now, Ruscha’s fateful sky highlights the tension between nostalgia and reality, history and destiny, and; rise and fall that underpin Ruscha’s radical and singular artistic output. Ever prescient and ever apposite, That Was Then This Is Now is a consummate painting in Ruscha’s cherished and iconic oeuvre.
