Ed Ruscha's another one I'm interested in. Like Twombly (but so unlike Twombly) the painted WORD is at the center of his work. Ruscha has that pop art, slick commercial art craftsmanship, Twombly, the faux-naif scribble.
I saw some amazing Twombly in an exhibit in Chicago at the Art Institute a couple weeks ago (mid June.) Ruscha I don't know much about aside from leafing through a few catalogues. I like his photos and paintings of gas stations and swimming pools.
The pop art nexus from Cornell to Warhol and Lichtenstein to Ruscha, Johns, Rivers, Hockney, Guston, and even Joe Brainard is pretty interesting, once you get past the clichés. There's a complex relationship to surrealism and dada, and to AbEx too. It's not a simple binary between pop art and other forms of twentieth century art that are more modernist (less postmodern). There's that pop art gesture of mimicking the "painterly" brushstroke.
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This is one of those areas where my knowledge is not extensive but not at all systematic. I am sure there are fairly important painters I don't know, since I only heard of Ruscha for the first time maybe two or three years ago, I think when Gary Sullivan mentioned him in a blog post or essay. There are maybe a half dozen artists I know pretty well, like Cornell, Tàpies, Rothko and then a little bit about a lot more. Then numerous blank spots where I don't even know what I don't know.
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Hocking -> Hockney?
A current artist who does the painted WORD (well, really drawn) is Molly Springfield. I kick myself for missing her show in SF -- something like this is right up my street.
Historically Johns' painting of symbols, designs, and letters is relevant. Going back further, Demuth's "Figure 5 in Gold" is a curious example, not especially representative of his work (and I don't know of what historical significance, though I certainly knew about it from a young age) but a good painting made from elements of the text of a poem.
Digging way back, one could look at Poussin's "Et in arcadia ego" paintings; but that comparison I think would yield mainly a contrast.
Corrected to "Hockney." I don't know who "Hocking" is but somehow I wrote his name, whoever he is.
Curiously I came across that "figure five" again in a monograph about Ruscha.
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