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Special thanks to Siri Engberg and Clive Phillpot, the Walker Art Center as their work on the catalog raisonne is heavily cited throughout this catalog, and for providing a broader context to understanding Ruscha’s graphic work.
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BIOGRAPHY /
stations /
liquid works /
hollywood /
mountains /
miscellaneous /
BIOGRA
B
orn in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, Ed Ruscha grew up in Oklahoma City before moving to Los Angeles in 1956 to study art at the Chouinard Institute. Upon graduating in 1960, Ruscha attracted notice as part of the Pop art movement as he worked for ad agencies honing his skills in design and layout, which became integral to his oeuvre of painting and photography. Since he began his career as a graphic artist, Ruscha looked to tropes of advertising and brought words to the forefront of his paintings. In speaking about his renowned word art, Ruscha said, “I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again.” Ruscha began his famous series of word paintings in the 1960s, depicting various views of the Hollywood sign, logos of movie studios and roadside views of gas stations on the California freeways. Throughout his career, his art became increasingly more abstracted, placing ambiguous phrases on vistas,
highways and monochrome backgrounds. Beginning in the 1980s, the artist began using a font he designed himself – Boy Scout Utility Modern – that contrasted attractively against his more painterly backgrounds. The font has an all-caps typeface in which curved letters are squared off, emulating the Hollywood Sign’s jagged edges. Recognized for creative paintings and drawings with unusual materials such as gunpowder, blood and Pepto Bismol, Ruscha continues to underscore the deterioration of language. It is no wonder that his work influenced the development of Conceptual art in the United States. His work includes paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, artist’s books and films, and is in the collections of major national and international museums. Besides for being the subject of numerous museum retrospectives, Ruscha also represented the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 with Course of Empire, an installation of ten of his paintings, propelling him to even greater international distinction. Ed Ruscha lives and works in Los Angeles.
APHY
STANDARD STATIONS Ed Ruscha once said, “I don’t have any Seine River like Monet. I just have the U.S. 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.” Having been brought up in Oklahoma, Ruscha drove along Route 66 at the age of 19 to begin his studies in Los Angeles. In his early 20s, he made numerous trips home along Route 66, passing the countless filling stations that punctuated the route’s entire length and photographing them along his drives. Twentysix Gasoline Stations as an art object rapidly achieved a fair measure of underground success. The book came to the attention of collector Audrey Sabol from Pennsylvania, who had seen the significant Pasadena Art Museum show, and was keen to meet Ruscha. She came to his studio, where she saw the large Amarillo Texas painting, and suggested that the image would work very well as a screenprint. Ruscha was hesitant of the time-consuming and costly process, but Sabol offered to pay for it in return for a portion of the edition. Ruscha went to Art Krebs, a printer in Los Angeles and paid him $40 to produce the screenprints that he had designed. Using his experience in design, Ruscha made multiple dramatic transformations as he translated the original source photograph of the Standard station in Amarillo, Texas to the final image (Fig. 1). He picked up on the vanishing points in the photograph, removed extraneous detail and then flipped the image. Lastly, he created a radical foreshortening to center the composition on a plunging diagonal line. This diagonal device, a fairly common procedure in both fine and commercial art, serves as a particularly useful method to draw the eye towards the focal point, the word STANDARD. The Standard Station edition was met with immediate acclaim, singled out by Life magazine as one of the most noteworthy prints of the 60’s graphics boom. In 1969 Ruscha returned to the theme, creating Mocha Standard, Cheese Mold Standard with Olive and Double Standard (Figs. 2-4). He would revisit the Standards a few more times in his graphic work, including Roadmaster and Ghost Station (Figs. 5-6). The Standard stations are undoubtedly one of Ruscha’s most iconic and illustrious subjects and an enduring tribute to the Great American West.
1. Standard Station, 1966 Screenprint on commercial buff paper 25 5/8 h x 40 w in (Engberg, no. 5)
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2. Cheese Mold Standard with Olive, 1969 Screenprint on paper 25 3/4 h x 40 1/8 w in (Engberg, no. 31)
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3. Mocha Standard, 1969 Screenprint on paper 24 7/8 h x 40 w in (Engberg, no. 30)
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4. Double Standard, 1969 Screenprint on paper 25 3/4 h x 40 w in (Engberg, no. 32)
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5. Roadmaster, 2003 Lithograph 13 h x 23 w in
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6. Ghost Station, 2011 Inkless embossed print on thick handmade paper 28 h x 46 w in
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LIQUID WORDS In 1967, Ruscha began exploring a new avenue in his use of text in paintings, creating his first “Liquid Words.” Upon receiving a fellowship at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1969, Ruscha translated this theme to his printmaking practice. The results were astounding, as the words not only appeared to be “spilled” onto the surface but were also done so by substances that referenced the subjects themselves. Despite using just two runs of ink, Ruscha masterfully achieved the silvery look of mercury and the sheen of fish scales in Anchovy (Fig. 1) and squeezed peppermint pink toothpaste in Mint (Fig. 2). He produced a few more Liquid Words at Tamarind that year including Carp and Carp with Fly (Figs. 3-4) In the following year, he expanded on the series with Jean Milant, a printer who began at Tamarind but subsequently opened his own studio, producing Made in California, Lisp and Drops among others (Figs. 5-7) Ruscha’s Liquid Words advance an age old practice of trompe l’oeil in art history and remain a favorite with many graphic collectors.
7. Anchovy, 1969 Lithograph on calendered Rives BFK paper 19 h x 28 w in (Engberg, no. 29)
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8. Mint, 1969 Lithograph on J. Green paper 17 h x 24 w in (Engberg, no. 9)
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9. Carp, 1969 Lithograph on white Arches paper 17 h x 24 w in (Engberg, no. 10)
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10. Carp with Fly, 1969 Lithograph on white Arches paper 17 h x 24 w in (Engberg, no. 11)
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11. Lisp, 1970 Lithograph on white Arches paper 20 h x 28 w in (Engberg, no. 43)
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12. Drops, 1971 Lithograph on white Arches paper 20 h x 28 w in (Engberg, no. 54)
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13. Made in California, 1971 Screenprint on white Arches paper 20 h x 28 w in (Engberg, no. 52)
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HOLLYWOOD Ruscha’s ability to hone in on powerful words, phrases and idioms that resonate with the viewer is the driver to his celebrated career. His use of the word Hollywood is perhaps the greatest example of this ability. The text’s power is inherent, serving not only as the backdrop of his career, but also evoking the many connotations and romanticized notions of the film industry and its depictions of American culture. Siri Engberg, author of Ruscha’s graphic catalogue raisonne, astutely notes that the three syllables in Hollywood read long and perfectly mirror the panoramic vistas depicted in the works. In keeping with Ruscha’s graphic style first seen in the Standard Station, Ruscha removes any superfluous detail from the landscape, and raises Hollywood to the peak of the hill rather than depicting the sign’s true location a ways down, heightening its cinematic effects. In keeping with Ruscha’s exploration into the bounds of printmaking, he experiments with printing this image in organic or mundane substances. In two examples here, Pepto-Caviar Hollywood and Fruit-Metrecal Hollywood (Figs. 14-15), Ruscha rejects typical inks in favor of commonplace food items, printing the former in Pepto Bismol and Caviar, while favoring a variety of fruit jams and diet soda in the latter.
14. Fruit-Metrecal Hollywood, 1971 Screenprint on copperplate deluxe paper 14 1/2 h x 42 w in (Engberg, no. 53)
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15. Pepto-Caviar Hollywood, 1970 Screenprint on copperplate deluxe paper 15 h x 42 3/8 w in (Engberg, no. 42)
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16. Landmark Decay, 2006 Lithograph 9 h x 13 w in
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17. Further Landmark Decay, 2006 Lithograph 9 h x 13 w in
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MOUNTAINS In 1996, Ed Ruscha began layering unusual or cryptic phrases over picturesque views of snowy mountains. Juxtaposed with these transcendent panoramas, Ruscha’s slogans become even more absurd and humorous. Ruscha once described a Wall Rocket to collector Glenn Furhman as a metaphor for a great work of art that shoots off the wall (Fig. 21). Between 2010 and 2015, Ruscha released a complementary series of limited edition mountain prints, introducing punchy new phrases such as “JET BABY,” “HISTORY KIDS” and “SPONGE PUDDLE” into his distinctive cannon (Figs. 20, 22, 23). The square-format accentuates the centrally placed text and each word occupies a new line atop the scenic, snow-capped mountains.
18. Sponge Puddle, 2015 Lithograph in colors on wove paper 29 h x 28 w in
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19. History Kids, 2014 Lithograph in colors on wove paper 29 h x 28 w in
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20. Jet Baby, 2012 Lithograph in colors on wove paper 29 h x 28 w in
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21. Wall Rocket, 2013 Lithograph in colors on wove paper 29 h x 28 w in
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22. Bliss Bucket, 2010 Lithograph in colors on wove paper 28 1/2 h x 28 w in
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23. Periods, 2013 Lithograph in colors on wove paper 29 h x 28 w in
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MISCELLANEOUS
24. Now, 1990 Lithograph on reeves BFK paper 60 h x 40 w in (Engberg, no. 201)
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25. Compass, 1990 Screenprint on P.T.I Supra paper 40 1/2 h x 29 3/8 w in (Engberg, no. 199) Published to benefit Earth Day 1990
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26. Sin - Without, 2002 Lithograph 27 h x 46 w in
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27. Cold Beer Beautiful Girls, 2009 Lithograph in colors on wove paper 40 5/8 h x 30 3/4 w in
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28. Safe and Effective Medication, 2001 Lithograph in colors on Somerset Satin paper 35 1/2 h x 35 w in
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29. That Was Then, This is Now, 2014 Lithograph on paper 34 1/2 h x 36 w in
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30. Well, Well, 1979 Screenprint in colors on white Stonehenge paper, with full margins 12 h x 48 w in
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31. Sea of Desire, 1983 Etching and aquatint on Rives BFK paper 22 1/2 h x 30 w in (Engberg, no. 138)
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32. Zoot Suit (Dedicated to the memory of Richard Duardo), 2015 Die cut letterpress on handmade paper with color threads 11 h x 14 w in
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33. It is a go, 2009 Lithograph printed in colors 17 3/4 h x 14w in
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34. Twenty Six Gasoline Stations (from the Book Covers series), 1970 Lithograph on white Arches paper 16 h x 20 w in (Engberg, no. 45)
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35. Various Small Fires (from the Book Covers series), 1970 Lithograph on white Arches paper 16 h x 20 w in (Engberg, no. 46)
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