“[I am] a victim of the horizontal line, and the landscape, which is almost one and the same to me.”
—Ed Ruscha
In her volume Why Draw a Landscape?, in which she answers the question for each artist featured in this Crown Point Press portfolio, Kathan Brown gives Ed Ruscha the answer of “stylization.” Mapping in itself is a practical and ordinary way of stylizing a landscape, but in his etched map Van Ness, Santa Monia, Vine, Melrose, Ruscha has taken additional liberties with mapmaking and landscape conventions, using fine speckles to create hypnotic, space-filled surfaces that recall the texture of asphalt streets, an element deemed erroneous in typical roadmaps. Brown describes Ruscha’s Los Angeles maps as “endless, going off in all directions. As maps they are systematic but not flat. As landscapes they are expansive and without horizon lines.” While much of Ruscha’s landscape work is defined by its distinctive and often extreme horizontality, Ruscha pushes the definition of landscape and his own stylistic hallmarks with Van Ness, Santa Monica, Vine, Melrose: four simple lines, none of them a typical horizon line, represent the city of Los Angeles with the characteristic “distinction and elegance of manner and bearing” – the definition Brown gives to “style” – that pervades Ruscha’s extensive body of landscape compositions.
“I’m not interested in style... I’m interested in looking.”
—Robert Bechtle
The collection of Robert Bechtle and Whitney Chadwick, assembled over their nearly forty-year marriage, reflects Bechtle’s legacy as a preeminent Photorealist along with Chadwick’s expertise as a historian and scholar. With works by Wayne Thiebaud, Ed Ruscha, and Leonora Carrington, among others, their extensive collection of editions and works on paper represents many of Bechtle’s fellow Bay Area artists, notable names in Pop, and female figureheads of Modernism and Surrealism whom Chadwick championed through her writings and teachings.
Known for his tightly detailed renderings of suburban landscapes and vintage cars, Bechtle is considered one of the founding Photorealists, a set of artists who used photographs as a point of departure for their hyperrealist art. Such interest in notions of realism permeate the works on offer, presenting a multitude of the artistic methodologies for interpreting the world: a visual interpretation of the musicality and movement of a ballet, postmodern representations of landscape, a surreal memory of a childhood home, and even different artists’ renditions of Bechtle himself. Following his passing at the age of 88 in 2020, Bechtle’s legacy persists through his collection, inspiring the continued search for unexpected beauty in the everyday.
