Ed Ruscha

Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Marianne Holtermann Fine Arts, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above in May 2001

This painting is in excellent condition. There is scattered airborne dust and fibers that has settled on the pigment which has an inherently gritty texture. Under UV light, there are no apparent restorations. The canvas has black tape around the pull margins and is not framed.
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"It's not a celebration of nature. I'm not trying to show beauty. It's more like I'm painting ideas of ideas of mountains...Mountains like this were only ever like a dream to me; they meant Canada or Colorado."

the artist in: Elisabeth Mahoney, 'Top of the Pops,' The Guardian, August 14, 2001

"Ruscha has again undermined any references to the sublime or majestic that the mountains might suggest by comically manipulating them."

Richard D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, London, 2003, p. 241

As one of the most prominent first-generation Pop artists, Ed Ruscha's illustrious career has thus far comprised a number of important historic periods. This major painting, Mountain Standard of 2000, acts parenthetically to enclose two defining moments of his output, and is thus a work of very significant importance to his art. The most immediately apparent compositional element is the towering mountain, as impressive and monolithic as the north face of the Eiger and the iconic Paramount Pictures emblem. In fact, the painted image was taken from extravagantly illustrated books of the Himalayas, which have proved seminal source material for the artist in the highly-acclaimed series of mountain paintings to which Mountain Standard is central. Also present through its unmistakable outline is the prominent and direct quotation of one of Ruscha's breakthrough paintings of gas stations, specifically his ten-foot wide masterpiece Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963, now held in the Hood Museum of Art, New Hampshire. The truly monumental snow-capped mountain is set in direct contrast to the negative shadow of perhaps Ruscha's most celebrated early work, and consequently this painting not only interrogates the limits of signifiers, but also the heritage of Pop itself and admits the foundational significance of Ruscha's early painting to his subsequent career. It thus represents the artist's profoundly self-referential admission of the importance of that early breakthrough.

Ruscha moved to the West Coast in the mid-1950s, driving down the legendary Route 66 in a black 1950s Ford from his small-town childhood home in Oklahoma. This road trip, made when Ruscha was only eighteen years old, proved to be a formative influence on his work. Along Route 66, the endlessly featureless horizon is only occasionally punctuated by huge billboards and gas stations. Starting as specks on the horizon and gradually getting bigger until they slide past the window, they are contemporary signposts of modern America set against the boundless sky and setting sun of the mythical landscape of the Wild West. The iconography of the landscape as seen from the road, specifically the gas stations that Ruscha documented in black and white photographs during trips along Route 66 in the early 1960s, subsequently resulted in Ruscha's book of photos Twentysix Gasoline Stations in 1963. It is immediately evocative of the beat generation as immortalized by Jack Kerouac's narrator in On the Road, which lends Ruscha's work a distinctly West Coast sensibility endemic to his immediate environment: "When you're on a highway, viewing the western US with the mountains and the flatness and the desert and all that, it's very much like my paintings." (the artist in: Ossian Ward, 'Ed Ruscha Interview' in Time Out London, February 12, 2008). Although the first reference to an American gas station appears in Ruscha's painting U.S. 66 of 1960, by far his most famous rendition of this subject is Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas: its seminal place within his oeuvre concretely manifested here in its silhouetted reappearance almost forty years later in his career.

Growing up in Oklahoma, Ruscha saw very little fine art in the flesh and was much more influenced by the immediacy of vernacular imagery: comic strips, book design and vivid commercial advertising. Nonetheless, the dramatic landscape of Mountain Standard continues a long tradition of landscape painting, in particular the Romanticized landscapes of Albert Bierstadt. A master of light, Bierstadt's broad panoramas depicted an idealized West as a bountiful land of plenty, imbued with a golden luminescence. They are deeply poetic images which appealed to the Manifest Destiny aspirations of those in the East Coast cities. Ruscha's landscapes are the inheritors of this genre. From afar, the hyper-realistic depictions are packed with the drama and the beauty of nature. Up close however, they are much more deadpan: "On close examination, Ruscha's super-real, photographic mountains break up into a complex series of little flat planes of color... similar to the methods used by billboard painters. The natural appearance of the mountains is only an illusion; rather, Ruscha gives us the 'idea' of the mountain." (Neal Benezra in: Exh. Cat., Washington D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution (and traveling), Ed Ruscha, 2000, p. 174). Nonetheless, there is something profoundly poetic found in his deadpan approach to contemporary visual culture which chimes with the linguistic play of his paintings. It is this spirit of Duchampian intellectual inquiry, embedded in his vernacular visual culture, which is the hallmark of his best work and which distinguishes him from the Pop tendencies of his peers.

When he first moved to Los Angeles in 1956, Ruscha worked as a sign painter and graphic designer. He also worked for an art book publisher, hand-setting the type and working the presses, jobs which fostered his interest in the formal qualities of printed text. At the same time, while studying at the Chouinard Art Institute, he encountered the work of Marcel Duchamp whose cool, anti-art stance provided the necessary foil to the prevalent Abstract Expressionist tendencies of contemporary art practice. On the one hand Ruscha's experiences as a commercial illustrator fostered an interest in the aesthetics of text, its manifold typologies and the formalism of letters as pure shapes worthy of artistic study; on the other the blueprint provided by Duchamp's word games stimulated an intellectual curiosity in found words - linguistic ready-mades - which became the lifeblood of Ruscha's work. His subsequent career-long exploration of the formal qualities of words is totally unique in the History of Art.