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Lot Essay
Painted in 1966-1969, Ed Ruscha’s Burning Gas Station belongs to one of the most iconic series in twentieth-century art. Inspired by the gas stations that punctuated his drives between Los Angeles and his native Oklahoma, the present work is just one of just five Standard Stations the artist painted in the 1960s (a sixth followed in 1986-1987). Collectively, these paintings form one of the most iconic and coherent bodies of work of the postwar period, with only a few remaining in private hands. In Burning Gas Station, a fiery explosion threatens to obliterate the iconic Standard station, as if Ruscha has decided to torch the “standards” by which art itself has been defined. Tinged with anarchist fantasies but also a devotion to the love of painting itself, the present work is an exceptional example of this notorious series, and has not been publicly exhibited since 1976.
“You know those movies where a train starts out in the lower-right corner and gradually fills the screen? The gas station is on a diagonal like that, from lower right to upper left. It also had something to do with teachings I picked up in art school, about dividing the picture plane. I didn’t really know what I was up to then, or what direction to take. I was just following these little urges. It was pure joy, to be able to do something like that.” - Ed Ruscha
Burning Gas Station is the pinnacle of the Standard Station paintings of the 1960s, as it was the last in the series, which he made at the decade’s end in 1968. Here, the gas station has been abstracted down to its barest essentials. The sleek, modern building and its gleaming glass interior is at odds with the chaos of the fiery explosion taking place nearby. This sentiment is ratcheted up to dramatic effect by Ruscha’s ingenious flair for pictorial composition, in which the diagonal format of the building causes it to zoom outward with the unstoppable speed of a roaring freight train. A sleek, ribbon-like border runs along the upper edge, in the form of a shimmering blue line that echoes the diagonal thrust of the painting’s composition. Ruscha has used a mysterious ombre effect to convey the night sky, which ranges from dark black to green and yellow. (This is one of the first instances in which Ruscha employed the ombre background, which ultimately became one of his longest-running visual motifs). The eerie night sky, combined with the explosion that has just rocked through the scene, makes for one of the most visually arresting paintings in the entire series.
No doubt influenced by his work in advertising and his love of classic Hollywood films, Ruscha creates a painting with a strong pictorial thrust. “You know those movies where a train starts out in the lower-right corner and gradually fills the screen?” he asked. “The gas station is on a diagonal like that, from lower right to upper left. It also had something to do with teachings I picked up in art school, about dividing the picture plane. I didn’t really know what I was up to then, or what direction to take. I was just following these little urges. It was pure joy, to be able to do something like that” (E. Ruscha, quoted in C. Tomkins, “Ed Ruscha’s L.A.,” The New Yorker, July 1, 2013, p. 50).
Ruscha's classic Standard Oil gas station is a sleek emblem of modernist architecture and a testament to postwar American standardization and abundance. In Burning Gas Station, Ruscha has rendered the otherwise pristine modern gas station in an act of wanton destruction, set in an almost post-apocalyptic wasteland. In this, and so much of Ruscha’s long running oeuvre, as in the Course of Empire series and the more recent Psycho Spaghetti Westerns, his depictions verge on the surreal, evoking a bleak future but painted in beautiful, rapturous detail.
“Seeing gas stations out on the open road was something else. The loneliness of each one of them, the isolation… islands on a flat plain.” - Ed Ruscha
A beacon to weary travelers, the iconic Standard fueling station offered up the modern amenities of a postwar America, at a time when the interstate highway system was being upgraded and modernized. Ruscha often traveled Route 66 between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City, which runs through the Texas panhandle and into western Oklahoma. As the mountains and steppes of New Mexico give way to the west Texas prairies, the terrain flattens out and widens in an almost cinematic way. “When I’m driving in certain rural areas out here in the West I start to make my own Panavision,” Ruscha said. “Seeing gas stations out on the open road was something else. The loneliness of each one of them, the isolation… islands on a flat plain” (E. Ruscha, quoted in K. Breuer, Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2016, pp. 13-4).
In the early 1960s, Ruscha would stop along the road and photograph the gas stations that he described as “islands” on the plains. He later compiled these into a small booklet called Twentysix Gasoline Stations in 1963. “I like the word ‘gasoline,’ and I like the specific quality of ‘twenty-six,’” he explained (E. Ruscha, quoted in 1965; reprinted in L. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Oakland, 1997, p.11). Each gas station was photographed in a different location and displayed its own distinctive architecture, but Ruscha had gathered them together into a group of like objects, rendering them anonymous, yet allowing the individual character of each building to speak for itself. Similar and yet different, the stations were serial in nature, and in this way they were on par with the classic procedures and systems of Pop Art, not unlike Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans. They were also decidedly ordinary—non-art objects snatched from the everyday world and exhibited as “art.” Ruscha realized the project had that “inexplicable thing” that he hoped for in his work—“a kind of ‘huh?’ ” effect. “People would look at it and say, ‘Are you kidding or what? Why are you doing this?’ That’s what I was after—the head-scratching” (E. Ruscha, quoted in C. Tomkins, op. cit., 2013, p. 54).
In 1963, Ruscha decided to make a painting from one of those black-and-white photographs, and he selected the Standard fueling station in Amarillo, Texas, for the project. “There was something new and clean about it,” he said. “The gas station had a polished newness that I just had to draw and then paint” (E. Ruscha, quoted in K. Breuer, op. cit., p. 14). The result was the dramatic, ten-foot wide Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, now in Dartmouth’s Hood Museum in Hanover, New Hampshire. In this, and in Burning Gas Station, the crisp, clean lines of the gas station’s modernist architecture are standardized into an anonymous, iconic sur-example of the standard station, which seems to stand in for all standard gas stations of their day. And yet, the ominous background imparts an air of mystery to the painting that Ruscha has maintained throughout the series.
In 1965, Ruscha painted the same Standard Station but added a new twist. It retained its dramatic, zooming diagonal format and black sky, but now flames could be seen pouring out of the building, in a painting he also titled Burning Gas Station (1965-1966; Private Collection). Around the same time, he also painted Norm’s, La Cienega, on Fire (1964; The Broad, Los Angeles) and Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965-8; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.). These paintings take subjects that have ubiquitous cultural associations and send them up in flames. “I knew at the time that I started the picture that I was going to assault that building somehow,” Ruscha said of the LACMA building, which he had seen in a helicopter tour of the new museum (E. Ruscha, quoted in A. Schwartz, ed., Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, Cambridge, 2002, p. 45).
In Burning Gas Station it is the tension between the gleaming, white perfection of the gas station and the chaos of the fiery explosion that makes this painting into the apotheosis of the entire series. By invoking the awesome power of fire, the painting leaves the realm of the everyday world to cross over into the uncanny valley of Surrealism. This strategy also touches upon the absurdist nature of Dada and its willingness to incorporate nonsensical objects as the subject of “High” art. So, too, does fire symbolize the transformative power of the Holy Spirit in the Catholic church, which Ruscha knew from his youth in Oklahoma. A powerful, primal entity that has allowed the species to survive for millennia, fire is a life-giving and yet utterly destructive force.
In Burning Gas Station, it’s as if arson simply isn’t enough for Ruscha, and he now needs firebombs and grenades, creating a violent explosion that obliterates the gas pumps entirely and threatens to burn up the entire painting. Why did Ruscha need to set fire to the Standard Station, a series that he had spent the better part of the 1960s returning to, time and again? The art critic David Hickey has famously suggested that Ruscha was in fact symbolically torching the “norms” and “standards” of traditional painting. In an oft-cited essay, Hickey described this idea, after seeing Ruscha’s work in 1982: "On my way back to the hotel I decided that no artist was so in love with Magritte that he would set a service station, a restaurant, and the Los Angeles County Museum on fire. Then I realized that the L.A. County was in the business of "norms and standards" and that I had probably been wrong about the Standard station. It wasn't a standardized station but a station which dispensed standards, like a restaurant which served norms or a museum which did both. The Standard station was some kind of Orwellian church, perhaps. … Why else set these bastions of public morality ablaze with metaphysical fire?" (D. Hickey, "Available Light," The Works of Edward Ruscha, San Francisco, 1982, p. 24)
In 1964, Ruscha had published his second artist’s book, Various Small Fires and Milk, in which he juxtaposed black-and-white photographs of fire, including a flaming book of matches and a blowtorch, with a single glass of milk. He also painted Damage that same year, in which the letters “A” and “G” are licked with fiery red flames. Ruscha seemed to enjoy the dichotomy between the unflinching modernist facade of an institutional building and the absurdist depiction of fire. In his explanation of Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, Rucha described this effect: “There’s this nice green lawn around the building and everything’s so peaceful–and suddenly there’s this little flame over there on the right side…that looks as if it could possibly engulf the whole building. But the fire is really like an after-statement – like a coda, as in a coda to music, which is something I find myself doing a lot in my work” (E. Ruscha, quoted in A. Schwartz, op. cit., pp. 236-7).
“Ruscha’s gas stations are emblems of temporary shelter in an unwelcoming landscape,” the American essayist D.J. Waldie has explained. (D.J. Waldie, quoted in K. Breuer, op. cit., p. 28). They are synonymous with the American way of life, uniting long stretches of highway and offering up a moment’s respite before continuing the journey. For the open road is a uniquely American concept, popularized by Jack Kerouac’s epic novel On the Road (1957) and in the rugged individualism of 1960s films like Easy Rider (1969). “I felt a deep affinity to On the Road,” Ruscha once said, “...that these renegade ruffians would start traveling the highways and sort of wing it with this noble idealism. So the notion of being out on the highways and experiencing America through that mode and then reflecting on it and sort of dancing with it held great appeal to me” (E. Ruscha, quoted in B. Monk, “Ed Ruscha: The Golden State,” Art in America, Vol. 99, No. 9 (October 2011), p. 158).
“I felt a deep affinity to On the Road...that these renegade ruffians would start traveling the highways and sort of wing it with this noble idealism. So the notion of being out on the highways and experiencing America through that mode and then reflecting on it and sort of dancing with it held great appeal to me.” - Ed Ruscha
Positioned on the brink between realism and abstraction, Ruscha’s Standard Stations are thus a meditation on modern life, presenting a metaphorical “essence” of a place that provides refuge from an existential search for self. By invoking the awesome power of fire, Ruscha touches upon the precarious do-or-die nature of life in the twenty-first century. “Fire has always been part of the L.A. unconscious,” the film critic Peter Wollen writes, “whether it takes the form of wildfires in the hills or riots and uprisings in the flatlands” (P. Wollen, “Hard Cues,” in Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Two: 1971-1982, New York, 2005, p. 9). In Burning Standard, the refuge has been destroyed, and yet its destruction is awesomely beautiful.
“You know those movies where a train starts out in the lower-right corner and gradually fills the screen? The gas station is on a diagonal like that, from lower right to upper left. It also had something to do with teachings I picked up in art school, about dividing the picture plane. I didn’t really know what I was up to then, or what direction to take. I was just following these little urges. It was pure joy, to be able to do something like that.” - Ed Ruscha
Burning Gas Station is the pinnacle of the Standard Station paintings of the 1960s, as it was the last in the series, which he made at the decade’s end in 1968. Here, the gas station has been abstracted down to its barest essentials. The sleek, modern building and its gleaming glass interior is at odds with the chaos of the fiery explosion taking place nearby. This sentiment is ratcheted up to dramatic effect by Ruscha’s ingenious flair for pictorial composition, in which the diagonal format of the building causes it to zoom outward with the unstoppable speed of a roaring freight train. A sleek, ribbon-like border runs along the upper edge, in the form of a shimmering blue line that echoes the diagonal thrust of the painting’s composition. Ruscha has used a mysterious ombre effect to convey the night sky, which ranges from dark black to green and yellow. (This is one of the first instances in which Ruscha employed the ombre background, which ultimately became one of his longest-running visual motifs). The eerie night sky, combined with the explosion that has just rocked through the scene, makes for one of the most visually arresting paintings in the entire series.
No doubt influenced by his work in advertising and his love of classic Hollywood films, Ruscha creates a painting with a strong pictorial thrust. “You know those movies where a train starts out in the lower-right corner and gradually fills the screen?” he asked. “The gas station is on a diagonal like that, from lower right to upper left. It also had something to do with teachings I picked up in art school, about dividing the picture plane. I didn’t really know what I was up to then, or what direction to take. I was just following these little urges. It was pure joy, to be able to do something like that” (E. Ruscha, quoted in C. Tomkins, “Ed Ruscha’s L.A.,” The New Yorker, July 1, 2013, p. 50).
Ruscha's classic Standard Oil gas station is a sleek emblem of modernist architecture and a testament to postwar American standardization and abundance. In Burning Gas Station, Ruscha has rendered the otherwise pristine modern gas station in an act of wanton destruction, set in an almost post-apocalyptic wasteland. In this, and so much of Ruscha’s long running oeuvre, as in the Course of Empire series and the more recent Psycho Spaghetti Westerns, his depictions verge on the surreal, evoking a bleak future but painted in beautiful, rapturous detail.
“Seeing gas stations out on the open road was something else. The loneliness of each one of them, the isolation… islands on a flat plain.” - Ed Ruscha
A beacon to weary travelers, the iconic Standard fueling station offered up the modern amenities of a postwar America, at a time when the interstate highway system was being upgraded and modernized. Ruscha often traveled Route 66 between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City, which runs through the Texas panhandle and into western Oklahoma. As the mountains and steppes of New Mexico give way to the west Texas prairies, the terrain flattens out and widens in an almost cinematic way. “When I’m driving in certain rural areas out here in the West I start to make my own Panavision,” Ruscha said. “Seeing gas stations out on the open road was something else. The loneliness of each one of them, the isolation… islands on a flat plain” (E. Ruscha, quoted in K. Breuer, Ed Ruscha and the Great American West, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2016, pp. 13-4).
In the early 1960s, Ruscha would stop along the road and photograph the gas stations that he described as “islands” on the plains. He later compiled these into a small booklet called Twentysix Gasoline Stations in 1963. “I like the word ‘gasoline,’ and I like the specific quality of ‘twenty-six,’” he explained (E. Ruscha, quoted in 1965; reprinted in L. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Oakland, 1997, p.11). Each gas station was photographed in a different location and displayed its own distinctive architecture, but Ruscha had gathered them together into a group of like objects, rendering them anonymous, yet allowing the individual character of each building to speak for itself. Similar and yet different, the stations were serial in nature, and in this way they were on par with the classic procedures and systems of Pop Art, not unlike Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans. They were also decidedly ordinary—non-art objects snatched from the everyday world and exhibited as “art.” Ruscha realized the project had that “inexplicable thing” that he hoped for in his work—“a kind of ‘huh?’ ” effect. “People would look at it and say, ‘Are you kidding or what? Why are you doing this?’ That’s what I was after—the head-scratching” (E. Ruscha, quoted in C. Tomkins, op. cit., 2013, p. 54).
In 1963, Ruscha decided to make a painting from one of those black-and-white photographs, and he selected the Standard fueling station in Amarillo, Texas, for the project. “There was something new and clean about it,” he said. “The gas station had a polished newness that I just had to draw and then paint” (E. Ruscha, quoted in K. Breuer, op. cit., p. 14). The result was the dramatic, ten-foot wide Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, now in Dartmouth’s Hood Museum in Hanover, New Hampshire. In this, and in Burning Gas Station, the crisp, clean lines of the gas station’s modernist architecture are standardized into an anonymous, iconic sur-example of the standard station, which seems to stand in for all standard gas stations of their day. And yet, the ominous background imparts an air of mystery to the painting that Ruscha has maintained throughout the series.
In 1965, Ruscha painted the same Standard Station but added a new twist. It retained its dramatic, zooming diagonal format and black sky, but now flames could be seen pouring out of the building, in a painting he also titled Burning Gas Station (1965-1966; Private Collection). Around the same time, he also painted Norm’s, La Cienega, on Fire (1964; The Broad, Los Angeles) and Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965-8; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.). These paintings take subjects that have ubiquitous cultural associations and send them up in flames. “I knew at the time that I started the picture that I was going to assault that building somehow,” Ruscha said of the LACMA building, which he had seen in a helicopter tour of the new museum (E. Ruscha, quoted in A. Schwartz, ed., Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, Cambridge, 2002, p. 45).
In Burning Gas Station it is the tension between the gleaming, white perfection of the gas station and the chaos of the fiery explosion that makes this painting into the apotheosis of the entire series. By invoking the awesome power of fire, the painting leaves the realm of the everyday world to cross over into the uncanny valley of Surrealism. This strategy also touches upon the absurdist nature of Dada and its willingness to incorporate nonsensical objects as the subject of “High” art. So, too, does fire symbolize the transformative power of the Holy Spirit in the Catholic church, which Ruscha knew from his youth in Oklahoma. A powerful, primal entity that has allowed the species to survive for millennia, fire is a life-giving and yet utterly destructive force.
In Burning Gas Station, it’s as if arson simply isn’t enough for Ruscha, and he now needs firebombs and grenades, creating a violent explosion that obliterates the gas pumps entirely and threatens to burn up the entire painting. Why did Ruscha need to set fire to the Standard Station, a series that he had spent the better part of the 1960s returning to, time and again? The art critic David Hickey has famously suggested that Ruscha was in fact symbolically torching the “norms” and “standards” of traditional painting. In an oft-cited essay, Hickey described this idea, after seeing Ruscha’s work in 1982: "On my way back to the hotel I decided that no artist was so in love with Magritte that he would set a service station, a restaurant, and the Los Angeles County Museum on fire. Then I realized that the L.A. County was in the business of "norms and standards" and that I had probably been wrong about the Standard station. It wasn't a standardized station but a station which dispensed standards, like a restaurant which served norms or a museum which did both. The Standard station was some kind of Orwellian church, perhaps. … Why else set these bastions of public morality ablaze with metaphysical fire?" (D. Hickey, "Available Light," The Works of Edward Ruscha, San Francisco, 1982, p. 24)
In 1964, Ruscha had published his second artist’s book, Various Small Fires and Milk, in which he juxtaposed black-and-white photographs of fire, including a flaming book of matches and a blowtorch, with a single glass of milk. He also painted Damage that same year, in which the letters “A” and “G” are licked with fiery red flames. Ruscha seemed to enjoy the dichotomy between the unflinching modernist facade of an institutional building and the absurdist depiction of fire. In his explanation of Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, Rucha described this effect: “There’s this nice green lawn around the building and everything’s so peaceful–and suddenly there’s this little flame over there on the right side…that looks as if it could possibly engulf the whole building. But the fire is really like an after-statement – like a coda, as in a coda to music, which is something I find myself doing a lot in my work” (E. Ruscha, quoted in A. Schwartz, op. cit., pp. 236-7).
“Ruscha’s gas stations are emblems of temporary shelter in an unwelcoming landscape,” the American essayist D.J. Waldie has explained. (D.J. Waldie, quoted in K. Breuer, op. cit., p. 28). They are synonymous with the American way of life, uniting long stretches of highway and offering up a moment’s respite before continuing the journey. For the open road is a uniquely American concept, popularized by Jack Kerouac’s epic novel On the Road (1957) and in the rugged individualism of 1960s films like Easy Rider (1969). “I felt a deep affinity to On the Road,” Ruscha once said, “...that these renegade ruffians would start traveling the highways and sort of wing it with this noble idealism. So the notion of being out on the highways and experiencing America through that mode and then reflecting on it and sort of dancing with it held great appeal to me” (E. Ruscha, quoted in B. Monk, “Ed Ruscha: The Golden State,” Art in America, Vol. 99, No. 9 (October 2011), p. 158).
“I felt a deep affinity to On the Road...that these renegade ruffians would start traveling the highways and sort of wing it with this noble idealism. So the notion of being out on the highways and experiencing America through that mode and then reflecting on it and sort of dancing with it held great appeal to me.” - Ed Ruscha
Positioned on the brink between realism and abstraction, Ruscha’s Standard Stations are thus a meditation on modern life, presenting a metaphorical “essence” of a place that provides refuge from an existential search for self. By invoking the awesome power of fire, Ruscha touches upon the precarious do-or-die nature of life in the twenty-first century. “Fire has always been part of the L.A. unconscious,” the film critic Peter Wollen writes, “whether it takes the form of wildfires in the hills or riots and uprisings in the flatlands” (P. Wollen, “Hard Cues,” in Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Two: 1971-1982, New York, 2005, p. 9). In Burning Standard, the refuge has been destroyed, and yet its destruction is awesomely beautiful.