Recent paintings by Joe Goode, most of them monumental in size, elaborate themes with which he has been engaged for more than 40 years. Among them are some of his finest works, as notable for the skillful ease with which they are composed as for their sheer, rigorous beauty.

Artists Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode grew up together, in every possible respect. They shared Southern childhoods in the 1940s; California art-school educations at the end of the ‘50s; trips to New York in the ‘60s. “In those days, you couldn’t think of making a living as an artist,” Goode told us, on the phone with Interview and his friend Ed Ruscha a few weeks ago. “Nobody made a living as an artist, unless you taught.”

In his 1435 treatise De pictura, the Renaissance-era philosopher Leon Battista Alberti notably laid out the rules for history painting, or istoria, in which rules of perspective and creating a lifelike esemblance to nature, with a clear emphasis on notions of beauty and visual pleasure, are given top priority. Equally important for Alberti was the idea that the spectator of a painting ought to be able to conceptually enter into that picture.