Jonathan Jones on artArt This article is more than 12 years oldRuscha's Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup is a modern masterpiece
This article is more than 12 years oldA satire, a still life and a warning, this postmodern work reveals Ed Ruscha to be one of the most important artists of our timeEd Ruscha's 1966 painting Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup is a modern masterpiece. It hangs in the Norton Simon museum in Pasadena, California, a gallery rich in Renaissance and baroque paintings. This might seem an incongruous setting for a work by Ruscha, who is famous for photographing and painting the urban scene of southern California in supercool images. Yet the serious setting of this high-cultural oasis is the perfect place to see what a powerful artist Ruscha is.
Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup gives you just what the title promises. It is a painting of the name Annie, in the bold chunky lettering used by the 1930s comic strip Little Orphan Annie, done in what looks like gooey golden syrup against an abstract yellow background. Ruscha has painted the syrup with a meticulous realism, so that you marvel at the glossy thickness and richness of the illusory substance.
The maple syrup letters seem to stand proud of the flat yellow surface, like mercury on a tabletop. Shiny gold against matt straw, bulbous three-dimensional forms against pure flatness: the painting collides two kinds of art. At the time Ruscha painted Annie, many American artists were preoccupied with the arguments of the critic Clement Greenberg, who claimed that modernism in painting lies in rigorous concentration on the pure flatness of the picture surface – the repudiation of all vestiges of visual illusion. Ruscha's painting is a travesty of that idea of absolute modern painting. The yellow plane is just a foil for the greater fascinations of word and realistic image – indeed, the realistic image of a word, written in maple syrup. So Annie is a "postmodernist" painting, a satire on the purity of abstract art.
Ruscha was not the first American artist to paint letters. In the 1950s, Jasper Johns painted alphabets and numbers in works that break apart the conventions of meaning in art. Johns asks where meaning lies. Is it in the painted letter (or number), or in the matted colours of which it is made? Does the meaning of art come from its content or its form?
Ruscha is more disturbing. He appears to be asking if words and images mean anything at all. The banality of the pop cultural word Annie – which was to become even better known and more graphically recognisable with the creation of the Broadway musical Annie in the 1970s – is treated to the honour of a fine, golden painting. But what does it say?
Why should it say anything? If the painting is a depiction of a word, it is also a portrayal of breakfast. In other words, it is a still life, a painting of a familiar object: maple syrup. Just as a Dutch 17th-century master might realistically paint a table of food and drink, so Ruscha paints with exquisite conviction a typical American foodstuff.
Is Annie written in syrup because the sentimental story of the little orphan is syrupy? Maybe, but this does not seem a cynical work of art. It is more like a mystery, and a touch uncanny. Perhaps the word Annie materialised in maple syrup on someone's breakfast table. That would make it a troubling apocalyptic warning, like the golden letters that appear above a laden table in Rembrandt's painting Belshazzar's Feast.
Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup both contains and mocks these possibilities. A satire, a still life, a warning ... at any event it is a great modern painting, and Ruscha is one of the truly important artists of our time.
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