user: Salvator Rosa | Art and design | The Observer
Salvator Rosa: Wild Landscapes Wallace Collection, London W1

Salvator Rosa's face is the first wild landscape of the show: there is a storm brewing on his brow, in his sulky mouth and in his especially troubled left eye. This romantic self-portrait from the National Gallery (1645), complete with black, shoulder-length hair and bell hat, had me in thrall as a teenager (I find his Mediterranean posturing somewhere between ridiculous and disturbing now). He comes with a Latin text carved into stone which translates as 'be quiet, unless your speech be better than silence'.

In the rest of the show, it is his splintered, storm-damaged trees that do the talking, dwarfing the tiny figures who meditate in their shade. Rosa is a painter of magnificent disquiet (except when, aspiring to Claude, he achieves a willed, short-lived serenity). He was born in Naples in 1615 and his landscapes greatly influenced English landscape painting and 18th-century landscape gardening. Many of his paintings include thinkers - hermits, abbots, readers - but it is the landscape itself that presses on us its dangerous commentary.
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Art: Salvator Rosa's face is the first wild landscape of the show, says Kate Kellaway: there is a storm brewing on his brow and in his troubled left eye.
Ed Ruschaâs Books and Landscapes at Gagosian
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The artist Ed Ruscha at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea: âI love books, the physical objects of them.â He paints and makes them. More Photos »

The artist Ed Ruscha was standing in the middle of Gagosian’s 24th Street gallery in Chelsea on a cool fall day, surrounded by paintings of books he has created over many decades. There were canvases that mimicked old tomes he found in flea markets and secondhand shops, and paintings of marbleized endpapers. There were renderings of open books more than 10 feet long with blank sheets of paper, ravaged with wormholes and water stains. “They’re a bit ominous,” he said, perhaps because of what many believe is the inevitable end of the printed word.

Mr. Ruscha (pronounced roo-SHAY), 75, doesn’t read on a Kindle or an iPad. “I don’t even use a computer,” he said unapologetically. “Every day I am reminded how far behind the world of technology I am. I’m not a great reader, either, but I love books, the physical objects of them.”

Mr. Ruscha also has a passion for road trips and the American landscape, as evinced not just in his paintings but in his landmark first book, “Twentysix Gasoline Stations,” from 1962. It’s a thin white volume of black-and-white photographs of gas stations in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, with no story, just captions identifying the stations and their locations.

Mr. Ruscha, who lives in Los Angeles, went on to produce scores of books, mostly about other everyday sights, like swimming pools, parking lots and palm trees. Shunning the elite notion of the “livre d’artiste” — those luxurious, limited-edition works that are collaborations between artists and private presses — he reinvented the genre as something inexpensive, accessible and easy to produce. Over the years these books have become a touchstone of Conceptual art and have inspired a new generation of artists who came of age with computers and Photoshop.

Some of their homages are now the subject of a show opening on Tuesday at the Gagosian Gallery’s Madison Avenue space. Called “Books & Co.,” it is named after the much-loved bookstore that was a fixture on the Upper East Side before closing in 1997. The exhibition includes volumes created by old hands like Bruce Nauman and the Philadelphia architects Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour and Robert Venturi, as well as those by younger artists like Dan Colen, Jonathan Monk and Tom Sachs. The subject matter touches on peanuts, cookies, trash, strip clubs, even erections. One book, by the Swedish-born artist Chris Svensson, is called “Various Studios and Homes Inhabited by Ed Ruscha.”

“Some are very literal,” said Bob Monk, a Gagosian Gallery director. “Others are more explorative, taking Ed’s books as a template.”

The show coincides with the recent publication of “Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha” (M.I.T. Press), which charts the indelible effect of Mr. Ruscha’s vision. “It’s already gone into a second printing, which is highly unusual,” said Roger Conover, an executive editor at M.I.T. Press.

Although the idea may seem antiquated now, 50 years ago Mr. Ruscha saw creating books as a cheap way to get his work in front of the public. Today there appears to be a kind of backlash against the digital universe, as artists are again embracing the notion of artist books despite the proliferation of electronic reading devices. “The quality of images on the Internet is deplorable,” said Mr. Monk, a Briton who lives in Berlin and creates books. “And printing these days has actually gotten cheaper.”

At the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., the demand for artist books and even exhibition catalogs has not diminished despite the availability of art books that can be seen online. “The book is a more intimate engagement with the artist,” said Tom Eccles, director at the Center for Curatorial Studies. “We find that we’re getting more visitors to our library than to our exhibits, in part because libraries are social spaces. Books have a durational audience. People still want a material relationship with the real thing.”
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assistant: A new show at Gagosian Gallery records the obsessions of the artist Ed Ruscha and those inspired by him: largely, for art on the printed page.