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Lot Essay
Los Angeles is a city which has remained a source of both inspiration and mystery for artists, residents, and visitors alike. This is particularly true for Ed Ruscha, whose unique stylistic tendencies brilliantly incorporate much of the Pop Art mentality, with its interest in the quotidian and a distinct penchant for wit, while updating this East Coast dominated movement with an aesthetic that is unmistakably from the West Coast. In fact, Ruscha was one of the forerunners of the burgeoning Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, making Sunset De Longpre a sort of homage to the city in which he found himself as an artist and a tremendous example of the stylistic qualities that have made Ruscha a household name.
In Sunset De Longpre, a heather gray canvas is speckled with black dots, immediately recalling the surface of a busy city sidewalk. Two bands of a slightly lighter gray section off the ground into thirds, a subtle compositional decision which could very well go overlooked by the viewer if not for the words “Sunset” and “De Longpre” which rest on top of the upper and lower bands, respectively. These two seemingly innocuous words are in fact the names of two major streets in Los Angeles which run parallel to each other, making Sunset De Longpre a kind of map or marker of the city.
Yet even with this knowledge, Sunset De Longpre remains incredibly mysterious, retaining a certain drama that is characteristic of Ruscha’s oeuvre. Throughout his career, Ruscha has maintained a keen interest in taking the mundane and the overlooked from everyday life and turning it into something quite theatrical, yet devoid of context. This is made clear in Sunset De Longpre through the incompleteness of the street view Ruscha has begun to illustrate, and augmented by the graininess of the image. As he explains, “A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words” (E. Ruscha quoted in R.D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, London, 2003, p. 239).
The present work similarly illustrates Ruscha’s continued interest in illustration techniques used in the advertisements and commercial billboards seen throughout Los Angeles, an interest that stems both from his artistic beginnings as a commercial artist and his travels along desert highways such as Route 66, where he played witness to numerous pieces of floating signage that fill the vast emptiness of the desert. The drastically condensed palette of black and gray, however, signals an evolution in his style to a more austere tone towards his depiction of common objects and words. Nevertheless, this transformation was long anticipated. “I remember this notion I had in school about Franz Kline, thinking how great it was that this man only worked with black and white. I thought at some point in my life I would also work with black and white – and here it is” (R. Dean and L. Turvey, Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonneé of the Paintings Vol. 4, 1988-1992, New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2009, 1).
In Sunset De Longpre, a heather gray canvas is speckled with black dots, immediately recalling the surface of a busy city sidewalk. Two bands of a slightly lighter gray section off the ground into thirds, a subtle compositional decision which could very well go overlooked by the viewer if not for the words “Sunset” and “De Longpre” which rest on top of the upper and lower bands, respectively. These two seemingly innocuous words are in fact the names of two major streets in Los Angeles which run parallel to each other, making Sunset De Longpre a kind of map or marker of the city.
Yet even with this knowledge, Sunset De Longpre remains incredibly mysterious, retaining a certain drama that is characteristic of Ruscha’s oeuvre. Throughout his career, Ruscha has maintained a keen interest in taking the mundane and the overlooked from everyday life and turning it into something quite theatrical, yet devoid of context. This is made clear in Sunset De Longpre through the incompleteness of the street view Ruscha has begun to illustrate, and augmented by the graininess of the image. As he explains, “A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words” (E. Ruscha quoted in R.D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, London, 2003, p. 239).
The present work similarly illustrates Ruscha’s continued interest in illustration techniques used in the advertisements and commercial billboards seen throughout Los Angeles, an interest that stems both from his artistic beginnings as a commercial artist and his travels along desert highways such as Route 66, where he played witness to numerous pieces of floating signage that fill the vast emptiness of the desert. The drastically condensed palette of black and gray, however, signals an evolution in his style to a more austere tone towards his depiction of common objects and words. Nevertheless, this transformation was long anticipated. “I remember this notion I had in school about Franz Kline, thinking how great it was that this man only worked with black and white. I thought at some point in my life I would also work with black and white – and here it is” (R. Dean and L. Turvey, Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonneé of the Paintings Vol. 4, 1988-1992, New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2009, 1).