Ed Ruscha

James Corcoran Gallery, Santa Monica
Robert A. Rowan, Pasadena (acquired from the above)
Christie's, New York, November 14, 2007, lot 174
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Ed Ruscha, 1987, pl. 5, illustrated in color
Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Ed Ruscha: Recent Paintings, January - April 1988, illustrated in color on the cover
Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Miami Art Museum; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Oxford, Museum of Modern Art; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Ed Ruscha, June 2000 - April 2001, pp. 106-107, illustrated in color

Exh. Cat., Lake Worth, Lannan Museum, Edward Ruscha: Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go, 1988, fig. 19, p. 33, illustrated in color
David Ehrenfeld, "Life in the Next Millenium: Who Will Be Left in the Earth's Community?" Orion Nature Quarterly, 1989, p. 4, illustrated 
Jo Ann Lewis, "Ed Ruscha, Getting Beyond Words: At the Hirshhorn, the Painter Who No Longer Spells Out His Affinity for Conceptual Art," Washington Post, July 2, 2000, p. G6, illustrated in color
Jean Wainwright, "Ed Ruscha," Contemporary, 2002, p. 95
Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of Art, Ed Ruscha and Photography, 2004, p. 207, illustrated in color
Robert Dean and Erin Wright, eds., Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Three: 1983-1987, New York, 2007, cat. no. P1986.10, pp. 186-187, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. The edges of the canvas are taped. There is very light evidence of handling along the edges, including minor and unobtrusive white abrasions at the corners. Under very close inspection, a few minor and unobtrusive pinpoint media and fabric accretions are visible. Also under close inspection, an approximately 6-inch vertical light drip accretion is visible approximately 28 inches from the right edge. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, a minor abrasion along the upper left edge fluoresces brightly but does not appear to be the result of restoration. Framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Ed Ruscha is of the greatest living painters working today. It was his pioneering spirit and keen creativity that placed him at the genesis of the Pop Art movement, becoming its leader on the West Coast. His incessant absorption of the influence of his surroundings—both geographic and cultural—and his readiness to push his own style in new directions is what sets Ruscha apart from his peers. As all great artists must eventually change directions in order to remain relevant, Ruscha’s Silhouette paintings (the series to which Untitled belongs) boldly broke from the Word paintings that had brought the artist such acclaim in his formative years. Here, we see how Ruscha expertly refocused his practice on the exploration of actual pictorial imagery while embracing a new technique in the use of an airbrush.

The original creative impulse for Untitled emerged from the profile of Ruscha’s 1939 Ford Sedan, whose outline reminded the artist of a lumbering elephant. Both the Ford and the elephant exhibit the same curvature along their backsides; the image of both automobile and animal struggling uphill bearing such a colossal weight appeared pleasingly poetic to Ruscha. This humorous transformation and distortion of a typical Pop, mass-produced object in the form of a car into an elephant holds many of Ruscha’s typical interests and yet extends his art into realms and imagery he had not previously explored.

Smooth as a silver gelatin print and just out of focus, the enigmatic Untitled was also inspired by black and white photography and old celluloid film. Interviewed on his Silhouette series, Ruscha explains: "The dark paintings came mostly from photography, although they are not photographically done or anything. I feel that they are related to the subject of photography—they are dark and strokeless, they're painted with an airbrush" (Thomas Beller, "Ed Ruscha," Splash, February 1989, n.p.). This allows Untitled to engage with the darker or more tragicomic aspects of Hollywood culture through the hauntingly unresolved nature of the painting and its imagery. There is panoply of allusions and interpretations one could take from the image of this lone elephant forever struggling uphill. During a period of such economic and political turbulence in 1980s America, Ruscha engages directly with the imagery and mythology of America as a promised land in Untitled. With the elephant metonymically representing America, Ruscha portrays the country to be in a literal uphill struggle against the endangerment of its myth of greatness. Ruscha’s political satire only begins here, as the elephant undoubtedly relates to and references the Republican Party, and in particular, Ronald Reagan’s infamously optimistic declaration that the country was entering “Morning again in America” in 1984. Such analyses of Untitled hinge on the singular and immediately identifiable subject matter; engaging with such a deceptively complex work as ‘Untitled’ is a rewarding experience for both the artist and the viewer. Untitled is quintessential evidence of Ruscha’s prolonged and unabated ability to paint works of the most exquisite order while underlining his reputation as one of the most relevant artists today just as he was fifty years ago.

Such is the success of Untitled and the related Silhouette paintings. As a series, the group was immediately embraced by the art world as an example of a renowned artist pushing himself and creating wholly innovative and novel contemporary works of art. In 1987, the Whitney Museum of American Art selected two Silhouette works to include in their Biennial and in 1991, New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired a similar Silhouette painting of an elephant entitled Jumbo for their permanent collection. This clearly demonstrates the critical acclaim Ruscha’s new paintings rapidly achieved, and proved to be a noteworthy accomplishment at the time; such an embrace from curators and collectors alike was a rarity for radically different works by established artists.

Throughout his remarkable career, Ed Ruscha has maintained an extraordinary conceptual consistency that serves as the foundation for his numerous groundbreaking stylistic explorations. For all the immediacy of his images, there is an ever-present undercurrent of paradox that complicates the seemingly direct relationship between representation and meaning, provoking a moment of pause from the viewer and preventing any straightforward notions of reading, seeing, and comprehending. Though Ruscha’s hallmark use of text is conspicuously absent from Untitled and the Silhouette paintings, sound and emotion are implicitly present in the elephant’s frozen gesture—head bowed, trunk curled under, hind feet about to propel the animal upwards—and serve as a wry nod to Ruscha's signature practice. As noted by Dan Cameron: “In many of the works from the ‘80s, Ruscha has chosen to leave words out altogether, replacing them by silhouetted images that are themselves enigmatic enough to force the issue of language into the open…Here Ruscha is playing somewhat with both our familiarity with his work, and with the self-described parameters of this art up to this point, by creation [sic] the expectation of language and then purposefully not supplying it” (Dan Cameron, “Love in Ruins,” Edward Ruscha: Paintings, Rotterdam, 1990, pp. 15-16). Executed with the clarity, energy, and elemental graphic force that typify the artist’s extraordinary complex visual treatise on the conditions of painting, Untitled is emblematic within Ruscha’s incisive body of work.