“I don’t have any River Seine like Monet, I’ve just got U.S. 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles” - Ed Ruscha

Painted in 1964, Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half is a defining painting in the canon of American postwar art. This monumental canvas presents two visions of America, one that celebrates the pioneering spirit of the Wild West and another in which the car has replaced the cowboy as a symbol of America’s future. Combining the realism of Edward Hopper, the inscrutability of Surrealism, and the bold audacity of Pop, Ed Ruscha’s striking painting represents a seismic shift in the artistic landscape in much the same way that Claude Monet’s paintings of Argenteuil came to represent a new, modern, Impressionist France in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the artist himself has said “I don’t have any River Seine like Monet, I’ve just got U.S. 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles” (E. Ruscha, “Ed Ruscha/NOW THEN,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, online [accessed: 10⁄8/2024]). The present work was painted at a seminal moment in the artist’s career as he emerged as the leading member of a nascent West Coast artistic community that would soon challenge New York as the place where the most exciting art in the country was being produced. Widely cited in the literature on the artist, Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half was previously on long-term loan to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and has most recently formed a cornerstone of Ruscha’s critically acclaimed retrospective Now / Then organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Set against a vast expanse of cloudless blue sky, the dramatic silhouette of a Standard Oil gas station rises up from a distant horizon. Using the Renaissance principle of one-point perspective, the building forces its way into the picture plane, a twentieth century architectural icon distinguished by its strict geometry and patriotic red, white, and blue trim. Opaque shadows fall across the façade of the building and punctuating these flat panes of planes of color are the various pieces of forecourt furniture that designate the instantly recognizable brand. Gas pumps stand proudly up-right with the blue and white Chevron roundels emblazoned on their front and serpentine black rubber hoses hanging down by their side (the only curved lines in the painting). Bright red uprights support the gas station’s large canopy which is topped off in dramatic fashion with the STANDARD marquee dominating the left hand register of the composition. In a moment of pure Surrealist conceit, this flatness of this dramatic form is punctuated by the torn pages of a comic book painted—with stunning trompe l’oeil effect—apparently suspended in the upper right corner.

Ruscha began encountering the iconic buildings that were to become such a crucial element of his paintings in 1956, when driving from his home in Oklahoma to California to start art school in Los Angeles. During the many subsequent trips Ruscha made driving backwards and forwards across the expanse landscape, the artist claimed to have developed his own form of cinematic way of looking at the landscape, “When I’m driving in certain rural areas out here in the West I start to make my own Panavision. I’m making my own movie as I’m driving… I get a lot of information out on the road that I use in my studio…” (E. Ruscha, quoted by K. Breuer, ibid., p. 15). It was on one such trip that he found himself driving through Amarillo, Texas when he came across one particular gas station (still standing today) which impressed itself into his consciousness. It would come to feature in many of the artist’s most important works including his iconic artist book Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas (1963, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth), and the present work.

The unique architectural form of the Standard gas station was designed specifically to stand out in the landscape. The striking angular silhouette rose up out of the flat countryside as a driver approached, pointing directly at them, almost challenging them to stop, pull in, and fill up. “They had a zoom quality,” the artist remembers, “the way they were lifted up in the air, and they really caught your eye, and the gas stations was a sleek metal box sitting underneath it’ (E. Ruscha, quoted by K. Breuer, ‘Fertile Ground: Ed Ruscha’s Great American West,’ in K. Breuer, Ed Ruscha and the Great American West,’ exh. cat., Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, 2016, p. 14).

The idea to combine this mainstay of the classic American road trip with a comic book has its origins in a painting which, when Ruscha first saw it, left him with the sensation similar—as he described it—to an atomic bomb going off in his mind. Jasper Johns Target with Four Faces (1955, Museum of Modern Art, New York) also took familiar objects and brought them together in a way which Johns said allowed them work on another level. Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half Ruscha not only combines two incongruous objects in a similar way, but also brings together ‘old’ and ‘new’ representations of America. “I wanted to bring unlike elements together,” the artist has said, “And so it’s no different than maybe a piece of music that might have a coda at the end, or some other element that that is unlike the rest of the work. Or I might add something to somehow antagonize the main theme. And that goes through with all my work. Sometimes there’s little oddities that I welcome” (E. Ruscha, interviewed by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, online [accessed: 10⁄3/2024]).

Ever since Europeans first landed on the eastern shores of what would become America in the sixteenth century, the vast expanse of uncharted territory that lay to the west has been a mythical source of both hope and inspiration for the population. From the epic landscapes of the Hudson River School, reflecting the manifest destiny of eighteenth and nineteenth-century settlers, to the pioneering spirit of the cowboy paintings of Frederic Remington, the American psyche has become entwined in the country’s relationship with its western boundary.

These are all elements that can be seen in the present work. The old American West is present in the motif of the Popular Western comic book from 1946, complete with a sheriff in his resplendent red shirt and revolvers in both hands on the cover. That same pioneering spirit is also present in the titles of the stories contained within: ‘Renegade Rancher,’ ‘Red Rope: A Sheriff Blue Steele Novelet,’ and ‘Son of a Gunman’ all attest to the drama, lawlessness, action and adventure that life in the untamed west promised. Yet, this is a version of America which, in Ruscha’s painting, is literally being torn up by ripping the comic book in half and hurling out of the picture plane. This proved to be a particularly adaptable motif for the artist as he also included it another painting from the period, Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western (1963, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts).
In Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, cowboy culture has been replaced by car culture. The Standard gas station represented a new, modern version of America in which the automobile, and its associated culture, has come to dominate (literally in the case of the present work) the landscape. This is something which resonated with Ruscha from the moment he saw that first gas station back in the 1950s. “There was something new and clean about it,” he has said. “The gas station had a polished newness that I just had to draw and then paint” (E. Ruscha, quoted by K. Breuer, ‘Fertile Ground: Ed Ruscha’s Great American West,’ in K. Breuer, Ed Ruscha and the Great American West,’ exh. cat., Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, 2016, p. 15).

Although ostensibly a painting of clever paradox, there are also moments of mirroring that occur in the composition too. Most noticeably this occurs in the elements of the gas pumps and the comic book themselves, where both the price of a copy of Popular Western and the gas tax (as indicated by a tiny label on the pump itself) are marked as 10c.

The gas stations became the stars of Ruscha’s cinematic ‘road movies’ and feature in many of the artist’s most important paintings. The present painting’s sister canvas, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1964, is in the collection of the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, and the motif appears in four other major paintings including: Standard Station, 1965; Burning Gas Station, 1966-69; Burning Gas Station, 1965-66; and the later Standard Station, 1986-87. Apart from the Hood Museum painting, none of the other paintings featuring the Standard gas station comes close to the present work in terms of size. Its formal arrangement was also adopted in other notable paintings from the period including Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1965-68, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.) and his later paintings of another icon of the American West, the Hollywood sign. There is, incidentally, also an autobiographical reference to this form that Ruscha has acknowledged. The artist has said that the dramatic angle of the composition was partly inspired by the 1942 Disney film Bambi, and, in particular, the way that Bambi’s father stood proudly in the forest, plus it references the stag featured in advertisements for the Hartford Insurance Company in the 1950s, a company where Ruscha’s father worked.

Ruscha’s journeys from Oklahoma to California and back again have attained an almost mythical status in the more than half century since he began them. The gas stations he witnessed along the way provided him with the source material for what would become one of the most iconic series of paintings in the American postwar canon. Unlike artists such the modernist painter Charles Sheeler and, to some extent even Edward Hopper, Ruscha removed extraneous detail to add a sense of power to his paintings. Depicting what Ruscha referred to as the “quietude of travel,” the present work becomes a celebration of these silent sentinels of the open road. “I think they [paintings without people] become more powerful without extraneous elements like people, cars, or anything beyond the story. That’s why these lines, these planes in a gas station were more important than trying to create an Edward Hopper. It became something for me to investigate. I was able to subtract a romantic story from the scene—I wanted something that had some industrial strength to it. People would have muddied it” (E. Ruscha interview by Thomas Beller, quoted in Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings. Volume One 1958-1970, Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2003, p. 85). Thus, Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half has become a representation of America itself, a reflection of the old and a promise of the new, as seen through Ruscha’s unique artistic vision.