Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

Depicting a relatively ordinary, if forlorn-looking, single-family home, Joe Goode's White House is an early and rare example of the California artist's unique approach to the ordinary, as well as impending associations with emptiness and loneliness. Goode made this work in the year following the debut of his Milk Bottle paintings at Walter Hopps's New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum; Artforum co-founder and editor John Coplans described the Milk Bottles, which would grace his magazine's cover in November of 1962, as “the loneliest paintings imaginable.” White House comprises a link between these early and infamous Milk Bottles and later renderings of the sky and clouds, among other subjects. As Jeff Rian writes in his essay for Joe Goode & Ed Ruscha: Yesterday's Treasures, “Goode's artistic curiosity led him to the over-looked, such as the empty milk bottle. In 1963 and 1964 he penciled simple, equally empty schematic houses in the middle of a field of monochromatic color...his private eye's sense of noticing had him thinking about common generalities, things so present they can be forgotten. His subjects tended toward the materially and literally transparent, leading from milk bottles to houses, to open skies, clouds, forest fires, water, smog, glass, the night sky, waterfalls, and the hill fires that the Santa Ana winds could spread across the arid mountains.”