Edward Ruscha

Cri_151170 Zoom


Edward Ruscha. OOF. 1962 (reworked 1963). Oil on canvas, 71 1/2 x 67" (181.5 x 170.2 cm). Gift of Agnes Gund, the Louis and Bessie Adler Foundation, Inc., Robert and Meryl Meltzer, Jerry I. Speyer, Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro, Emily and Jerry Spiegel, an anonymous donor, and purchase. © 2014 Edward Ruscha

Audio Program excerpt

MoMA Audio: Collection


Director, Glenn Lowry: In 2012, Ed Ruscha discussed the inspiration for OOF.

Artist, Ed Ruscha: Now, this comes from when I was a kid and I would read cartoons, and somebody would always be punching someone else in the stomach, and the sound that came out was always "OOF." That word was born to be captured in a painting and the visual outlay of those letters and everything just made it perfect.

Glenn Lowry: "OOF" is an example of onomatopoeia: a word that suggests the sound it describes.

Curator, Anne Umland: When you stare at the those letters, they're very pure and solid and geometric, these gorgeous spheres and block shapes that comprise the "f" and that, to me, makes it even funnier. You have pure geometry and yet used in a way that evokes this very silly, irreverent "oof" of a sound. It makes you think about how paintings can't speak out loud, and yet this one, you hear it.

Glenn Lowry: In a 2004 interview with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Ruscha discussed how his word pictures grew out of an early experience he had studying with a printer in Los Angeles.

Ed Ruscha: Setting type and working with typography, I began to see these things as pictures. And then also the world of painting came into this thing, and bang, they started melding together, and I could see that I should paint a picture of that word rather than print it on paper.


"The single word, its guttural monosyllabic pronunciation, that's what I was passionate about," Ruscha has said of his early work. "Loud words, like slam, smash, honk." The comic-book quality of these words reflects the Pop artists' fascination with popular culture. (This interest is even more explicit in Ruscha's images of vernacular Los Angeles architecture.) Lettered in typography rather than handwriting, the words are definite and impersonal in shape; unlike the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s, Ruscha had no interest in letting a painting emerge through an introspective process: "I began to see that the only thing to do would be a preconceived image. It was an enormous freedom to be premeditated about my art."

Words like oof, smash, and honk all evoke sounds, and loud and sharp ones. They also, as Ruscha says, have "a certain comedic value," and their comedy is underlined by the paradox of their appearance in the silent medium of paint, and with neither an image nor a sentence to help them evoke the sounds they denote. Oof is particularly paradoxical, as a word describing a wordless grunt. In Ruscha's hands, its double O's also pun on recent paintings—the Targets and Circles of Jasper Johns and Kenneth Noland. Works like this one wryly point up the arbitrariness of our agreements on the meanings of our visual and verbal languages.