Ed Ruscha Standard Station Prints For Sale

Ed Ruscha's fascination with the open road started young. In 1956, at eighteen, he drove from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles along Route 66, and the trip planted an interest in the roadside architecture of American highways that never really left him. One photograph from that period became the foundation for his entire career: a Standard Oil station in Amarillo, Texas, published in his 1963 artist's book Twentysix Gasoline Stations. "There was something new and clean about it," he later said. "That gas station had a polished newness that I just had to draw and then paint."

The image became a painting, then a screenprint in 1966, an edition of 50 built around a plunging diagonal line that splits the composition almost in half, reducing the station to a few flat planes of colour against a glowing horizon. Ruscha returned to the same screens three more times in 1969 alone, producing Mocha Standard, Cheese Mold Standard with Olive and Double Standard, each a different colourway of the identical composition, before setting the subject aside entirely for 42 years. He came back to it once more in 2011 with Ghost Station, revisiting an image that had, by then, become one of the defining pictures of postwar American art. The Standard Oil company itself carried its own outsized history: once the largest business in the world under John D. Rockefeller, broken apart by the federal government into seven smaller companies, its "Baby Standard" stations lining Route 66 all the way until the brand became Chevron in 1984.

Standard Station has become one of the defining images of postwar American art, reproduced, referenced and exhibited more consistently than almost anything else Ruscha ever made. It sits permanently in major museum collections, anchors his retrospectives, and gets cited constantly as the moment Pop Art fully absorbed the American highway into fine art, a gas station elevated to the same visual status as a cathedral or a haystack in the European painting tradition it was quietly answering. Ruscha's own reflection on the image's outsized presence gets at exactly why it's endured: "It sort of aggrandizes itself before your eyes... that was the intention of it, although the origins were comic." Few subjects in his entire catalogue carry that same weight, an image built from something as unremarkable as a roadside photograph that went on to define an entire strand of American art history.

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