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Lot Essay
“I began to believe that it is not so much what you say that matters, but how you say it. This ruled out so-called emotional painting. Everything should be preplanned.” - Ed Ruscha
This remarkable, early work by Ed Ruscha demonstrates his initial flirtation with abstraction, before he rejected the genre in lieu of a self-confessed "premeditated" approach to Pop art. The creamy, boundless white background is emboldened by an abstractly painted canvas collage element on the upper register, and two horizontal and highly gestural passages of paint on the lower register. Fulcher Frew (1960) recalls the gestural spontaneity of the Abstract Expressionists, a style taught and encouraged at Ruscha’s alma mater, the Chouinard Art Institute in downtown Los Angeles. Curiously, Fulcher Frew also speaks to Ruscha’s life-long fascination with serialism and sequencing. The organic, neat stacking of the painted passages organizationally foreshadows the meticulous and sequential layout of Ruscha’s text paintings that would soon develop into his quintessential style. Whilst anticipating several important facets from the future of Ruscha’s career, Fulcher Frew also marks a temporary farewell to abstraction, relinquished to pave the way for a new stylistic focus; as Ruscha recalls, "I began to believe that it is not so much what you say that matters, but how you say it. This ruled out so-called emotional painting. Everything should be preplanned" (E. Ruscha, quoted in Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, 2016, p. 195).
This remarkable, early work by Ed Ruscha demonstrates his initial flirtation with abstraction, before he rejected the genre in lieu of a self-confessed "premeditated" approach to Pop art. The creamy, boundless white background is emboldened by an abstractly painted canvas collage element on the upper register, and two horizontal and highly gestural passages of paint on the lower register. Fulcher Frew (1960) recalls the gestural spontaneity of the Abstract Expressionists, a style taught and encouraged at Ruscha’s alma mater, the Chouinard Art Institute in downtown Los Angeles. Curiously, Fulcher Frew also speaks to Ruscha’s life-long fascination with serialism and sequencing. The organic, neat stacking of the painted passages organizationally foreshadows the meticulous and sequential layout of Ruscha’s text paintings that would soon develop into his quintessential style. Whilst anticipating several important facets from the future of Ruscha’s career, Fulcher Frew also marks a temporary farewell to abstraction, relinquished to pave the way for a new stylistic focus; as Ruscha recalls, "I began to believe that it is not so much what you say that matters, but how you say it. This ruled out so-called emotional painting. Everything should be preplanned" (E. Ruscha, quoted in Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, 2016, p. 195).