"Published to accompany the exhibition In Focus: Ed Ruscha, on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, from April 9 to September 29, 2013, this book focuses on Ruscha's photographic work, specifically the thirty-eight images he made for his 1965 photobook Some Los Angeles Apartments"--Provided by publisher.

"One of the most consistently inventive artists of recent times, Los Angeles-based Ed Ruscha has been a pioneer in the use of language and imagery drawn from the popular media. From his early powerful word paintings to his influential artist books of the sixties and seventies to his recent colorful views of generic mountains, Ruscha has investigated the spaces between highways and journeys, images and words, abstraction and representation, public imagery and the contemporary landscape. In this publication, which accompanies a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, Neal Benezra, Kerry Brougher, and Phyllis Rosenzweig focus on all aspects of Ruscha's career, revealing him not merely as an artist closely linked with Los Angeles, but as an important international figure in contemporary art."--Amazon.

Edited and with an Essay by Sylvia Wolf.

Schwartz examines Ruscha's diverse body of work, including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, books, and films, and discusses his relationship with other artists with whom he sparked the movement known as West Coast pop.

This is the catalogue for Ed Ruscha's exhibition "Los Angeles Apartments" which will be held at the Kunstmuseum Basel from June till September 2013. In 1965, Ed Ruscha published Some Los Angeles Apartments, the third of his ongoing series of photographic books, and completed a group of ten related drawings that depict examples of the ubiquitous Southern California apartment building. The exhibition will show the preparatory studies for these drawings which were recently acquired by the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Kunstmuseum Basel. They are based directly on the photographs Ruscha made of the apartment buildings. Included also, are photographs from Ruscha's Gasoline Stations series of 1962, one of which served as a model for the painting of Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas of 1963. By immediately juxtaposing preparatory studies, drawings and photographs, Ruscha's working method is clearly highlighted and the significance of photography for his passage between abstraction and realism made evident. Ed Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1937 and grew up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, from 1941 to 1956. He moved to Los Angeles, California, and attended Chouinard Art Institute from 1956 to 1960. His work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in major museums and private collections throughout the world. In 2001, Ruscha was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Letters as a member of the Department of Art. He was chosen by the U.S. Department of State to represent the United States at the 2005 Venice Biennale.