Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn In Half (1964) sold for $68.3 million in November at Christie’s New York, setting a new auction record for the artist.
Widely regarded as one of the most important American artists, Ed Ruscha’s career spans over six decades, from the early 1960s to the present. In fact, he began gaining recognition as early as the late 1950s, when he started making small collages using imagery and words taken from everyday sources such as advertisements. This interest in the ordinary eventually led him to use the cityscape of his adopted hometown—Los Angeles—as a recurring source of inspiration. Now 87 years old, Ruscha continues to combine images of the city with words and phrases drawn from everyday language, conveying a uniquely urban experience to the viewer. His work explores the banality of modern urban life and the constant flood of media images and information we are forced to confront daily.
The rivalry between Los Angeles and New York is a longstanding one, whether in sports, wealth, music, or art. When the American Pop Art movement was at its peak with Andy Warhol, New York was considered its center. Over time, however, Los Angeles emerged as a serious competitor—and Ed Ruscha was a central figure in that shift. What is perhaps less well known is that Ruscha’s depiction of words and phrases, as well as his understated humor and precisely composed photo books, had a profound influence on the development of conceptual art. Words and sentences have been a central element of his practice since 1959, appearing in his paintings from that time onward.
What Do You Mean?
The use of words and text in 20th-century art can be traced back to Cubist painters like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, who incorporated painted and collaged letters into still lifes. Language play also played a central role for Dada artists, whose radical and often humorous use of words left a lasting legacy. The Dadaists were an early influence on Ruscha, and his ambiguous and playful use of words can be seen as a continuation of that tradition.
Since 1956, Ed Ruscha has lived and worked in Los Angeles, making him something of a favorite among local collectors—and arguably, Hollywood’s go-to painter. The city and its film industry have had a major influence on Ruscha and the visual language he developed. Words like “Hollywood” and symbols like the Twentieth Century Fox logo began appearing in his work as early as the 1960s. The dimensions of these paintings often mirror the widescreen format of films. In one such piece, we see the silhouette of the Hollywood sign set against the iconic Los Angeles sky, blurred with orange and red spray paint. The colors and shadowed text evoke either a sunset or a scorching, white-hot heat. Since the late 1960s, Ruscha has depicted the famous sign in his works as a kind of monument to the myths and dreams of the city.
“There are things I examine constantly and feel should be elevated to a higher status—almost philosophical or religious. That’s why it’s useful for an artist to pull things out of context. It’s about the idea of turning something that isn’t a subject into a subject.”
In 2005, Ed Ruscha represented the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale with Course of Empire, a ten-painting installation inspired by the 19th-century American artist Thomas Cole’s series of the same name. The work references the pitfalls surrounding modernist visions of progress.
Ruscha’s body of work uniquely blends the iconography of Pop Art with the documentary rigor of conceptual art. His works are held in major public collections including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.