One of the original US highways, the historic Route 66, which stretches from Chicago to Los Angeles, is an icon of American culture lending its backdrop to popular movies, television shows, literature, music and art.

Over several decades, Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha would regularly traverse the famed roadway to visit his family in Oklahoma City. Armed with his camera and a penchant for the banal, Ruscha documented the roadside gas stations that dotted his journey — eventually converting one of his modest black-and-white photographs into a dramatic sequence of paintings.

Ruscha’s paintings of the Standard station defined the modern American landscape and contributed to the bold visual language of the 1960s.

On 19 November 2024, Christie’s New York is honoured to offer Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964) as part of the 20th Century Evening Sale.

‘Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half is the great synthesis and climax of his masterpieces of the early 1960s,’ explains Christie’s Vice Chairman, Max Carter. ‘Monumental and rich in paradox, it is an icon of the post-war era, of the west, of American art.’

Mark Rozzo, the author of Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward and 1960s Los Angeles, traces the origins of this 20th century tour-de-force in the accompanying catalogue essay, High Octane. Below, we share an exclusive excerpt from the text.

Excerpts from ‘High Octane’ by Mark RozzoIn August of 1956, the 18-year-old Ed Ruscha set out for Los Angeles from his hometown of Oklahoma City in a 1950 Ford. His copilot was his high-school best friend, a precocious teenage musician named Mason Williams.

Their 1,300-mile odyssey is a standard component of the Ruscha origin story, not to mention the cosmology of postwar American art: You could argue that what Warhol was to Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes, Ruscha has been to highways — the all-American, high-speed built landscape of yammering signage and cheapo architecture. Roads, streets, freeways, the blown-tire detritus on their shoulders, the endless sequence of gas stations that line them: Ruscha has been a visual bard of the world as seen through a windshield.

As Adam D. Weinberg, the former director of the Whitney Museum, once put it, ‘No American artist has a more singular vision of the American landscape, especially the impassive iconography of the road, than Ruscha.’ Or, as Ruscha himself said, ‘Everything you see on the street I’m influenced by.’

After arriving in Los Angeles, Williams would eventually find work as a writer for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and fame as the AM-radio hitmaker behind ‘Classical Gas’. (Ruscha created the artwork for Williams’s 1969 LP, Music.) For his part, Ruscha — a kid with a fixation on India ink who had once dreamed of becoming a comic-book artist — found a car-centric city that had, in his words, ‘the right kind of decadence and lack of charm to make an artist’. Make him an artist it did, even if Ruscha, in contrarian fashion, has occasionally deflected this notion. ‘Being in Los Angeles’, he said in 1966, ‘has had little or no effect on my work.’ Nevertheless, Ruscha grew to become L.A.’s artist laureate by near-universal acclamation. The city has remained his base of operations since the day he arrived 68 years ago.

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ON ROUTE 66: OKLAHOMA TO LOS ANGELESOne way or another, about six years later, Ruscha was reversing the course, driving back home from Los Angeles along Route 66 to Oklahoma City to visit his family. This time he’d brought a camera. It’s easy to imagine how it might have unfolded: The gas station in northeast Amarillo caught his eye. It was on the left now. Ruscha stopped, photographed it from across the road, may or may not have gassed up, kept driving. He’d been doing this for much of the route, stockpiling images of service stations — the less interesting, the better.

He would spin this aggressively boring visual documentation of aggressively boring architectural phenomena into an artist’s book with an aggressively boring name: Twentysix Gasoline Stations, published in 1963, available for mail order at three dollars a pop. Ruscha sent a courtesy copy to the Library of Congress, which returned it to the artist with a polite but curt letter, ostensibly rejecting the volume for its lack of informational or aesthetic value. Ruscha would then transform one of the 26 black-and-white photographs from the book — the one of the Standard station on Northeast Eighth Avenue (now East Amarillo Boulevard), in Amarillo — into what is arguably his best-known image as a fine artist.

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A TRADEMARK OF SORTSRuscha would later claim that he originally had no intention of ever using the photographs from Twentysix Gasoline Stations as the basis of painted works. But after the book came out, he began conceptualizing how to transfer the image of the Standard station in Amarillo into a large-scale painted image: ‘a gargantuan approach to a big canvas,’ as he later summed it up.

Starting with tempera and ink-and-paper studies, Ruscha mapped out a design that boldly split the canvas on a diagonal, from upper left to lower right, as he had done previously with his Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (depicting the 20th Century Fox logo), a work shown at his 1963 Ferus show, suggesting, as Ruscha himself would later observe, that he saw the Standard station as another kind of ‘trademark’.

He also included spotlights in the new painting (three, winnowed down from seven in early studies), which reversed the orientation of the Amarillo photograph and showed the Standard station from a vantage point that seemed to be practically below the paved surface of Northeast Eighth Avenue. The steep angle, exaggerated perspective, and vaulting diagonals evoked the time-tested Hollywood filmmakers’ trick of shooting an approaching train from a low angle: Ruscha thus brought surging velocity to this still image, a manoeuvre he would continue to employ in future paintings.

There was another, improbable influence behind the stunning composition that became known as Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas. Ruscha has also claimed that he modeled the Standard station “after the way Bambi’s father stood in the forest.” This, in turn, reminded him of the stately buck used as a corporate symbol by the Hartford Insurance Company, where his father (who died in 1959) had worked. The autobiographical dimensions of Ruscha’s Standard station imagery have rarely been probed.

If the original black-and-white photograph had been pointedly boring, the resulting painting — reds and whites with an infinite inky sky and three probing yellow spotlights, all stretched across five-and-a-half by ten feet of canvas — was over-the-top drama. Ruscha had imbued a banal specimen of roadway architecture with jaw-dropping beauty and thunderous monumentality. ‘It has to be called an icon,’ Ruscha later said. ‘It sort of aggrandizes itself before your eyes. That was the intention of it, although the origins were comic.’

Having never intended to make a gas-station painting, Ruscha now decided to make another one. For this iteration, the same size as the first, he would show the Standard station in daylight.

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ON STANDARD STATION, TEN CENT WESTERN BEING TORN IN HALF, 1963Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas (Day) was perhaps an early title, as Ruscha kept the layout he used for the first painting but dispensed with the night sky and replaced it with a bright blue that, for all its stylization, is pretty much an exact match for a clear afternoon sky on the Great Plains. For obvious reasons, the yellow spotlights are now gone. As in the first painting, there are five red Chevron pumps (close inspection reveals their make and model to be Wayne 505s) in the same two-three configuration. (The totals on the pumps — $2.27, $4,21 — remind us that we’re looking at the early 1960s.)

But, because we’re now seeing the service station in daylight, there are deeper shadows, cool blue ones, under the canopy; the first painting had shown this area illuminated by fluorescent tube lighting, drenching everything in shadowless, artificial white. In the original Standard station painting Ruscha left in some perspective lines, displaying draftsman-like underpinnings; in the second version they have been expunged.

A wholly novel element differentiates the new painting: a pulp magazine hovering near the top-right corner that determined the title Ruscha ultimately gave the piece: Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half. The dime Western in question, ripped and spindled, is the October 1946 issue of Popular Western, which Ruscha had included in his Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western, executed in the spring of 1963.

In the Standard station painting, the mutilated magazine appears to sit, trompe l’oeil style, on the flat, pristine surface. In one of his studies, Ruscha had placed a cocktail olive there instead of the magazine. Ruscha later described this impulse toward such visual non-sequiturs: ‘Often, when an idea is so overwhelming I use a small unlike item to ‘‘nag’’ the theme.’ He has also compared this antagonistic, ‘unlike’ element to the coda on a piece of music. In adding Popular Western, Ruscha also slyly brought a human figure into the composition, as the cover shows a Texas Ranger who has just shot a bank robber. ‘So I was painting a painting of a painting’, the artist said.

Ruscha’s twin Standard station paintings hinted at the seriality Warhol had explored in his Campbell’s soup can paintings. As in other Ruscha works there was an emphasis on a word —‘STANDARD’ — but now the word was part of a landscape. There have been inflated interpretations attempting to read ‘standard’ as a commentary about standardization or ordinariness, but Ruscha has always shot them down, suggesting that any buried meanings are in the eyes of the beholder.

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‘MONUMENTAL AND ICONIC’Ruscha, now 86, is still at it every day in his Culver City studio. When I once asked him about his daily routine there, he said, ‘Well, sometimes I’m fumbling. And sometimes I have a vague idea.’ Yet, across the decades, Ruscha has continued to explore modern life with mordant wit, exquisite technique, and probing attention to picture-making. In the stuff of the everyday — conversational snippets, a pothole in Sepulveda Boulevard, a nondescript gas station in west Texas — he has found deep reservoirs of meaning, or, at least, opportunities to stop, look, consider, appreciate, laugh, or scratch your head: ‘Huh?’ Like, say, Bob Dylan and Don DeLillo, he has shown Americans who they are. And his impassive gaze on the bland surface of things has imbued them with unmistakable aura and hum.

‘Once you pick the object and reproduce it faithfully’, Ruscha has said, ‘you want the thing to glimmer. You want it to have inner power. You want to instill a thing with some earth-shaking religious feeling. You want to hear organ music.’ When you look at a painting like Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half you hear it loud and clear.