A dream juxtaposition

One last post on Ruscha & Magritte: As I walked through LACMA's Magritte & Friends, I found myself hoping that I would arrive at a gallery in which Magritte's Time Transfixed (left) would be juxtaposed with Ruscha's The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire. I knew that it wasn't going to be, but I felt like the show was building to a faceoff between the two.

LACM is the closest Ruscha got to making a surrealist painting. Instead it is 'spectacularly unlikely' even richly 'unreal.' Ruscha painted it between 1965 and 1968 when he painted a number of works that are similarly unreal --check out Give Him Anything And He'll Sign It, No Sleep, Strange Catch For A Fresh Water Fish, all from 1965. In 1966 Ruscha apparently dropped unlikely unreal-ism for his new liquid paintings, which occupied him throughout much of 1967 as well.

In 1968 he returned to unlikely unreality, possibly only to finish LACM, a painting that the Hirshhorn says he started in 1965. Most everything else Ruscha made in 1968 were liquid words, with a burning Standard station thrown in for good measure.

While Magritte painted lots of unlikely and unreal images (with a hat-tip to Rene Russo, we referenced one of them yesterday), Time Transfixed is among the most unique and unlikely images in his oeuvre. (He riffed on his own apples, bowlers, pipes, etc., but not so far as I know on this one.)

Again, Ruscha to Lynn Zelevansky (excerpt) in the LACMA show's catalogue: "The struggle between the unreality and the reality of the painting is the right kind of struggle to make a great picture, and I think maybe that's why it could be my favorite [Magritte]."

Zelevansky: "I think it's often interpreted in Freudian sexual terms."

Ruscha: "I hope it is. It better be. It is sexual. It is all those things."

Oh by the way: Ruscha started painting LACM in 1965, when he was a little-known, just-beginning-to-be-exhibited artist. It was also the year that the LA County Museum opened. Freudian indeed?