That Was Then, This Is Now (2014) by Ed Ruscha sets two lines of white condensed capitals against a sky of deep purple-grey cloud — THAT WAS THEN above, THIS IS NOW below, the text spaced and calm within a ground that is anything but. Dark masses of cloud drift through the lavender field, soft-edged and atmospheric, the kind of sky that sits between weather and mood. The inscription floats across it with the neutrality of a stencil, unbothered by what surrounds it.

The phrase is the most complete sentence Ruscha had put into a print in years — subject, verb, temporal marker, twice over, the structure of the cliché intact and deliberate. He had spent his career interested in fragments, in phrases that resist completion, in words stripped of their narrative context. This one arrives with full grammatical resolution, a sentence that closes itself on both sides. That completeness is part of what gives it weight: THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW is a phrase everyone has heard, used, and understood, the kind of American vernacular that carries decades of accumulated meaning without belonging to any particular context. It can be consolation or severance, acceptance or dismissal, depending entirely on who says it and when.

Against that purple storm the phrase acquires a specific gravity. This is not a neutral ground — it presses in, atmospheric and charged — and the text holds steady within it, white and unhurried, making its statement against conditions that suggest everything is in motion. By 2014 Ruscha was in his mid-seventies, and a work that places a phrase about the irreversibility of time against a turbulent sky is not without personal weight, whatever the artist's stated intentions. The print is large — 29 by 44 inches — and at that scale the clouds are genuinely present, the text genuinely monumental, the combination harder to read as purely formal.

For more information or to buy That Was Then, This Is Now by Ed Ruscha, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.

View Ed Ruscha original art for sale, or learn how to sell Ed Ruscha artwork.