Description
Ruscha, Edward - Dutch Details - Artist Book. Deventer, The Netherlands: Stichting Octopus / Sonsbeek, 1971. Boards. Book condition is good. First Edition, First Printing. Oblong folio - 23 pp (10 lateral fold-out pages). 4.5 x 15 in./11.5 x 38 cm. closed dimensions. Total of 116 black and white photomechanical illustration photographs on 10 fold-out leaves. Original white card covers printed in black. Each page folds out to double-width. Edition of 3000 copies (of which only 200 are said to survive). The most rare and sought after Ruscha title. Although the Octopus Foundation published a large edition of 3000 copies, the majority of Dutch Details print run was mistakenly destroyed in a warehouse, and the remaining copies are now highly sought after by Ruscha collectors.
Dutch Details was produced for the 1971 Sonsbeek exhibition 'Sonsbeek out of Bounds?. Much in the manner of his contemporaries Vito Acconci and Robert Smithson, Ruscha chronicles a series of movements across a bridge from one side of a canal to the other and back again. "[It] bears some relation to Every Building on Sunset Strip as a panorama format that reflects both sides of a thoroughfare.The unique place of Dutch Details among Ruscha's books and its emphatic horizontality reflect Ruscha's response to the Dutch landscape around Groningen, where he was invited to work' (Engberg and Phillpot). Engberg and Phillpot, Ed Ruscha Editions, B14; The Open Book, pp.198-99. From Princeton University: Edward Ruscha?s books of sequential photomechanical images began in 1963 withTwentysix Gasoline Stations, (GAX 2006-2396N) published in an edition of 400 numbered copies under the imprint ?A National Excelsior Publication,? funded by Ruscha himself. The 26 pages offer black and white images of gas stations along Route 66, which Ruscha had taken in 1962. The format had great appeal to him and he went on to produce several dozen other sequential image books over the next few decades. For many historians, Ruscha?s Gasoline Stations represents the beginning of the American artists? books movement. 1971 was a busy year for Ruscha. He completed five paintings, along with books, films, prints, and drawings, and received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Three books were completed this year: A Few Palm Trees, Records, and Dutch Details. The third was a commission by Sonsbeek ?71, an international arts exhibition at the Groninger Museum, for which Ruscha was to create a work on site that would then be exhibited. As the plane was approaching The Netherlands, the pilot announced that the weather was bad and he would have more details soon. Ruscha thought, ?Dutch details,? and that was the beginning of the project. Unlike other book projects, Dutch Details is horizontal in format. The images are of bridges and the buildings taken with a hand-held camera. Although the Octopus Foundation published a large edition, the majority of the print run was mistakenly destroyed in a warehouse, and the remaining copies are now highly sought after by Ruscha collectors. Ruscha said ?I don?t want people to go look at these photographs after they are enlarged and they see them on the wall in museums, maybe under the auspice of a museum and consider them to be like a painting ? The book, in the end, will be a closer representation of the project.?
From Askart: A painter, printmaker, and filmmaker, Edward Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1937, and lived some 15 years in Oklahoma City before moving permanently to Los Angeles where he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute from 1956 through 1960. By the early sixties he was well known for his paintings, collages, and printmaking, and for his association with the progressive Ferus Gallery, which also included artists Robert Irwin, Edward Moses, Ken Price, and Edward Kienholz. Ruscha has consistently combined the cityscape of his adopted hometown with vernacular language to communicate a particular urban experience. Encompassing painting, drawing, photography, and artist's books, Ruscha's work holds the mirror up to the banality of urban life and gives order to the barrage of mass media-fed images and information that confronts us daily. Ruscha's early career as a graphic artist continues to strongly influence his aesthetic and thematic approach. In 1962, Ruscha's work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Dowd, Phillip Hefferton, Joe Goode, Jim Dine, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the historically important and ground-breaking "New Painting of Common Objects," curated by Ferus Gallery alumni Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum. This exhibition is historically considered one of the first Pop Art exhibitions in America. Since 1964, Ruscha has been experimenting with painting and drawing words and phrases, often oddly comic and satirical sayings. When asked where he got his inspiration for his paintings, Ruscha responded, "Well, they just occur to me; sometimes people say them and I write down and then I paint them. Sometimes I use a dictionary." From 1966 to 1969, Ruscha painted his "liquid word" paintings. Ruscha achieved recognition for his word paintings and for his many photographic books, all influenced by the deadpan irreverence of the Pop Art movement. Born and raised Catholic, Ruscha readily admits to the influence of religion in his work. He is also aware of the centuries-old tradition of religious imagery in which light beams have been used to represent divine presence. But his work makes no claims for a particular moral position or spiritual attitude. Ruscha has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives that have traveled internationally, including those organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1982, the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2000, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in 2002, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2004. Also in 2004, The Whitney Museum of American Art organized two simultaneous Ruscha exhibitions which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. In 2001, Ruscha was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member of the Department of Art. Leave Any Information at the Signal, a volume of his writings and interviews, was published by MIT Press in 2002 and the first comprehensive monograph on the artist, Richard Marshall's Ed Ruscha, was published by Phaidon in 2003. In 2005, Ruscha was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale. The traveling exhibition "Ed Ruscha, Photographer" opened at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2006. A major retrospective of Ruscha's works is scheduled for 2009 in London, England.
