Exceptional Prints: Ed Ruscha, 1966

With a career spanning from the early 1960s to the present, Ed Ruscha is one of the foremost artists working today. Since his first exhibition at the legendary Ferus Gallery in 1963, Ruscha has cultivated an internationally celebrated practice that examines vernacular language, commercial culture, and the topography of Los Angeles in particular. As Adam D. Weinberg, former director of the Whitney Museum, has said, “No American artist has a more singular vision of the American landscape ... than Ruscha.”

Featured on the occasion of the IFPDA Print Fair are Ruscha’s iconic images Standard Station and Surrealism Soaped and Scrubbed, which both date from 1966—a pivotal year in the artist’s career.

“I don’t have any Seine River like Monet, I’ve just got US 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.”

—Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1962 (detail). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

In 1956, Ruscha embarked on a road trip from his childhood home of Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, where he has resided since. This journey, and the artist’s many subsequent trips on Route 66 between the two cities during the late 1950s and the 1960s, played a formative role in shaping the style and substance of his visual language. As art historian Karin Breuer notes, for Ruscha, “those frequent drives through desolate countryside resulted in a spatial perspective akin to the cinematic wide screen.”

Ed Ruscha [far right] with fellow artists Joe Goode and Jerry McMillan with Ruscha’s ’39 Chevy, 1970

Studio notebook entries by Ed Ruscha, July and August 1964

Ruscha was especially fascinated by gas stations, then still a relatively rare sight on the newer highways out west. Struck by their geometric architecture and isolated roadside locations, the artist began photographing these service stations during his travels; he eventually compiled a selection of those images into Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), his first artist’s book.

Ed Ruscha, cover and spread from Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963

“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.”

—Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963. Oil on canvas

The same year, Ruscha painted one of the buildings he had photographed: a Standard gas station in Amarillo, Texas, whose polished appearance had particularly captured his attention. With its dramatically angled perspective and stark, planar construction, the resulting work (Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas) would become one of the most significant images of Ruscha’s career, and one that he would return to countless times in various mediums and forms.

In 1966, Pennsylvania-based art collector Audrey Sabol visited Ruscha’s studio; after seeing the aforementioned painting, she offered to fund the artist’s creation of a print version. Ruscha produced a screenprint edition—his first—titled Standard Station, an impression of which is featured here. In this edition, the artist replaced the searching spotlights and black night sky of his painting with a saturated blue-to-orange gradient background using the challenging “split fountain” technique, one of the first fine-art applications of the screenprinting process. The result is reminiscent of Los Angeles’s blazing sunsets—another emblematic visual element that would resurface in Ruscha’s oeuvre.

Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, 1966

Notably, this print was made during an important year in Ruscha’s career, one in which he also created three artist’s books, including Every Building on the Sunset Strip, and designed the cover for the now-iconic September 1966 Artforum issue dedicated to surrealism.

Other impressions of this print are held in museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

Ed Ruscha, Business Card, 1960s

From 1965 to 1969, Ruscha freelanced as a layout designer for Artforum, where he was listed under the publication’s masthead as Eddie Russia, a pseudonym derived from a common mispronunciation of the artist’s name. Using his early training in graphic design at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts), which continues to inform his work, Ruscha cut and pasted the layout of the magazine together by hand.

When invited to design the cover of the September 1966 issue of Artforum, which was devoted to the theme of surrealism, Ruscha adopted a similarly analog approach: he carved the word surrealism out of balsa wood and placed the letterforms on a soapy glass surface illuminated from below with colored lights to be photographed.

Alongside the regular print run of Artforum, Ruscha also created a small number of C-prints of the cover image, of which the present work is a rare example. He signed and marked these prints with an edition size of 11,003—playfully accounting for the then-total circulation of Artforum itself (11,000), plus the three known C-print prototypes.

Artforum, September 1966, Vol. 5, No. 1

Installation view, ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2023

Made in 1966, this early commercial project notably anticipated the artist’s interest in trompe-l’oeil compositions, such as his “liquid word” paintings and editions, which he began in the following year, and his 1971 trio of wordless Suds screenprints.

This print was originally gifted by the artist to Charles Cowles, who was the publisher of Artforum from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s. Another impression of the present work is in the collection of Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland, and a related drawing, Surrealism (1966), is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Ed Ruscha, Surrealism, 1966. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

“I like the tension of having a combination of words or [a] word in front of something that is also lively in itself. That tension is where I live.”

—Ed Ruscha

 Unless otherwise stated, all works are © 2025 Ed Ruscha

Cover image: Jerry McMillan, Ed Ruscha holding his book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1967 (detail). © Jerry McMillan. Courtesy of Jerry McMillan and Craig Krull Gallery

IFPDA PRINT FAIR