Ed Ruscha‘s Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, the last privately owned large-scale painting he created in the 1960s, will be hitting Christie’s auction with a pre-estimated cost of $50m USD. The 1964 artwork recently appeared in the touring retrospective, ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, which went on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art afterwards. It’s being brought to auction by owner Sid R. Bass, a Texas oil heir who first acquired the work in 1976 through a trade for another Ruscha painting.
Widely considered as the father of LA contemporary art, Ruscha first moved to the City of Angels from Oklahoma in 1956 to attend Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts), using banal freeways, low slung buildings and kitchy signage as source material for his abstract paintings that he’d overlay with poetic wordplay. This penchant for the mundane first spurred out of his travels along the famous Route 66 highway, spotlighting trivial subject matter, such as gas stations. In Standard Station, Ruscha presents the roadside facility abstracted to appear like an architectural monument, creating it into an icon in itself. “It sort of aggrandizes itself before your eyes,” Rusha previously said of the painting. “That was the intention of it, although the origins were comic.”
“Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half is the great synthesis and climax of his masterpieces of the early 1960s,” explained Christie’s Vice Chairman, Max Carter, in a statement. “Monumental and rich in paradox, it is an icon of the post-war era, of the west, of American art.” If the painting sells for its estimate, it will almost match the auction record for a Rucsha work, with Hurting the Word Radio #2 (1964) currently standing in the top spot, selling for $52.5m at Christie’s in 2019.
Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale will begin on November 19.
