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Lot Essay
During his early years as a young art student on the Pacific coast of the United States, Ed Ruscha often drove between his adopted home of Los Angeles and his childhood environs of Oklahoma. Driving in the desert became a unique and productive kind of rolling studio for him, one hand on the steering wheel, one jotting notes for future projects and visualizing themes for paintings, as A Question of Cities exemplifies.
The present work is a striking, large-scale painting showcasing the trademark aspects of Ruscha’s unique visual language—a hypnotic mix of the Pop, the Surreal, and the commercial. It is organized in a monumental horizontal orientation, measuring over six and one half feet across. Evoking Mark Rothko’s powerful color fields, virtually the entire pictorial space of this impressive canvas is suffused with a glowing sunset that paints the sky and throws off burnished copper, orange and umber light in all directions.
Both the shape of the canvas and the view are suggestive of a driver’s perspective as seen from behind the windshield of a car speeding through the desert southwest at twilight, even to the extent that the painting’s proportions are similar to that of a windscreen—wide, low, and long. The flat, open and vast terrain suggest, too, the look of panoramic cinematography, an influence acknowledged by Ruscha, the artist having mentioned in interviews that he has been given to creating his own filmic visions of what he observed as he traveled along the desert highways. Ruscha once remarked, “(w)hen I’m driving in certain rural areas out here in the West, I start to make my own Panavision. …I get a lot of information out on the road that I use in the studio” (quoted in K. Breuer, et al, Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, San Francisco, 2016, p. 13).
A tiny, lone figure —a hitchhiker, a rancher, or a stranded traveler, perhaps?— standing near the bottom left corner of the painting seems to be searching the curtain of sky, or traversing the endless expanse. He is all but swallowed-up by the immensity encompassing him. The image is almost entirely sky, with only the thinnest sliver of virtually inconsequential land at the very bottom edge of the canvas, the ground entirely dwarfed by the firmament.
Just as Jasper Johns took the familiarity of a map of America and turned it into an abstract celebration of form and color, this work is no mere realistic depiction or conventional landscape study. The colors and the sheer immensity of the skyscape appear as hyper real, seeming brighter and more splendid than nature itself, akin to a painted backdrop for a motion picture, or a carefully composed and filtered still from a wide-screen Technicolor- Cinemascope cowboys-and-Indians’ Western from the 1950s.
An intriguing feature of the painting that separates it from conventional landscape studies is the inclusion of the names of eight American cities painted in white letters that stand in contrast with the darker sky, the names listed in their correct east/west and north/south orientation. The city names appear almost as if stars rising in the early evening, or the winking lights of faraway towns in the distance, or even possibly mileage signs indicating cities along the way, destinations the traveler must choose.
The careful arrangement of city names reflect the artist’s ongoing interest in maps and mapping, a theme evident in many of Ruscha’s works, some showing city street grids by day, or outlined in lights at night. The question marks following each of the names may express the artist’s love of words and typography perhaps more than any specific themes regarding urban issues, as such (Ruscha completed another painting of similar scale and concept in the same year, with the mirror-image title Cities in Question).
The open road and the driver’s-seat perspective became a significant influence on Ruscha’s paintings of the 1970s, including, most notably, the present work. The open highway, the desert, and the uninterrupted landscape—together with their idealized and kitsch representations in the vernacular language of movies and advertisements— have indeed been uniquely American sources of inspiration for Ruscha, showing the artist a way to define a distinctively American and Western art all his own, as distinct from the European.
“‘Picture Postcard’ sunsets with brilliant gradations of red, orange, and yellow became a frequent motif in Ruscha’s art beginning in the 1970s. …(T) he sunset continues to be an identifier for him of the West…and symbolic of his own personal journeys there” (K. Breuer, et al, Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, San Francisco, 2016, p. 12). So closely associated in both his life and his art with both the American West and the image-fantasy of the American West, Ruscha, explores—obliquely and ironically, but not without affection, too—the American frontier, freedom, isolation, escape, endless horizons, place, and even the end of the open road era itself.
The present work is a striking, large-scale painting showcasing the trademark aspects of Ruscha’s unique visual language—a hypnotic mix of the Pop, the Surreal, and the commercial. It is organized in a monumental horizontal orientation, measuring over six and one half feet across. Evoking Mark Rothko’s powerful color fields, virtually the entire pictorial space of this impressive canvas is suffused with a glowing sunset that paints the sky and throws off burnished copper, orange and umber light in all directions.
Both the shape of the canvas and the view are suggestive of a driver’s perspective as seen from behind the windshield of a car speeding through the desert southwest at twilight, even to the extent that the painting’s proportions are similar to that of a windscreen—wide, low, and long. The flat, open and vast terrain suggest, too, the look of panoramic cinematography, an influence acknowledged by Ruscha, the artist having mentioned in interviews that he has been given to creating his own filmic visions of what he observed as he traveled along the desert highways. Ruscha once remarked, “(w)hen I’m driving in certain rural areas out here in the West, I start to make my own Panavision. …I get a lot of information out on the road that I use in the studio” (quoted in K. Breuer, et al, Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, San Francisco, 2016, p. 13).
A tiny, lone figure —a hitchhiker, a rancher, or a stranded traveler, perhaps?— standing near the bottom left corner of the painting seems to be searching the curtain of sky, or traversing the endless expanse. He is all but swallowed-up by the immensity encompassing him. The image is almost entirely sky, with only the thinnest sliver of virtually inconsequential land at the very bottom edge of the canvas, the ground entirely dwarfed by the firmament.
Just as Jasper Johns took the familiarity of a map of America and turned it into an abstract celebration of form and color, this work is no mere realistic depiction or conventional landscape study. The colors and the sheer immensity of the skyscape appear as hyper real, seeming brighter and more splendid than nature itself, akin to a painted backdrop for a motion picture, or a carefully composed and filtered still from a wide-screen Technicolor- Cinemascope cowboys-and-Indians’ Western from the 1950s.
An intriguing feature of the painting that separates it from conventional landscape studies is the inclusion of the names of eight American cities painted in white letters that stand in contrast with the darker sky, the names listed in their correct east/west and north/south orientation. The city names appear almost as if stars rising in the early evening, or the winking lights of faraway towns in the distance, or even possibly mileage signs indicating cities along the way, destinations the traveler must choose.
The careful arrangement of city names reflect the artist’s ongoing interest in maps and mapping, a theme evident in many of Ruscha’s works, some showing city street grids by day, or outlined in lights at night. The question marks following each of the names may express the artist’s love of words and typography perhaps more than any specific themes regarding urban issues, as such (Ruscha completed another painting of similar scale and concept in the same year, with the mirror-image title Cities in Question).
The open road and the driver’s-seat perspective became a significant influence on Ruscha’s paintings of the 1970s, including, most notably, the present work. The open highway, the desert, and the uninterrupted landscape—together with their idealized and kitsch representations in the vernacular language of movies and advertisements— have indeed been uniquely American sources of inspiration for Ruscha, showing the artist a way to define a distinctively American and Western art all his own, as distinct from the European.
“‘Picture Postcard’ sunsets with brilliant gradations of red, orange, and yellow became a frequent motif in Ruscha’s art beginning in the 1970s. …(T) he sunset continues to be an identifier for him of the West…and symbolic of his own personal journeys there” (K. Breuer, et al, Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, San Francisco, 2016, p. 12). So closely associated in both his life and his art with both the American West and the image-fantasy of the American West, Ruscha, explores—obliquely and ironically, but not without affection, too—the American frontier, freedom, isolation, escape, endless horizons, place, and even the end of the open road era itself.