Lot Description

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937)
Damage
oil on canvas
72 x 67 in. (182.9 x 170.2 cm.)
Painted in 1964.

Provenance

Irving Blum Gallery, Los Angeles
Ohio Match Company, Wadsworth
American Federation of the Arts, New York
Gift from the above to the present owner

Saleroom Notice

Please note this lot is tax exempt from sales tax as set forth in the Sales Tax Notice in the back of the catalogue.

Pre-Lot Text

Property from the Anderson Fine Arts Center

Literature

M.-L. Cosnil, "Americans à la Biennale," Informations et Documents, 1967.
M. Compton, Pop Art, London, 1970, p. 139, no. 160 (illustrated).
L. Alloway, American Pop Art, exh. cat., New York, 1974, p. 37.
L. L. Cathcart, Edward Ruscha, exh. cat., Buffalo, 1976, p. 6.
Alford House, Anderson Fine Arts Center, Catalogue of the Permanent Collection, Anderson, 1981, p. 44 (illustrated).
B. Evans, "Smash, Flash, and Spam," Vancouver Courier, Vancouver, 1982, n.p. (illustrated).
Y.-A. Bois, "Thermometers Should Last Forever," Edward Ruscha: Romance with Liquids, exh. cat., New York, 1993, p. 12 (illustrated). K. Brougher, "Words as Landscape," Ed Ruscha, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 167 (illustrated).
P. Poncy, ed., Edward Ruscha Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings 1958-1970, vol. 1, New York, 2003, pp. 130-131, no. P1964.07 (illustrated in color).

Exhibited

Los Angeles, Ferus Gallery, Edward Ruscha, 1964.
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, V Paris Biennale, 1967, p. 37, no. 19.
New York, American Federation of Arts, Small Paintings for Museum Collections, 1969.
Richmond, IN, McGuire Hall, Art Association of Richmond; Alford House, Anderson Fine Arts Center, and Lafayette Art Center, Indiana Collects, 1978, no. 1.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Vancouver Art Gallery; Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Works of Ed Ruscha, 1982, pp. 15-16 , 63 and 174, pl. 24, no. 14 (illustrated).
New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Edward Ruscha: Early Paintings, 1988, no. 7 (illustrated in color).
Newport Beach, Newport Harbor Art Museum; Seattle, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington; Palm Springs Desert Museum; Purchase, NY, Neuberger Museum, State University of New York, and Phoenix Art Museum, L.A. Pop in the Sixties, April 1989-August 1990, p. 12 (illustrated in color).

Lot Notes

This lot is tax exempt from sales tax as set forth in the Sales Tax Notice in the back of the catalogue.


Damage is one of the most important Ed Ruscha paintings ever to come for sale. Boldly painted, the work embodies Ruscha's unique take on Pop Art. "Damage" seems a word ripped from the headlines of a newspaper while the accompanying flame embodies the word. Damage though is without the context of a specific tragedy and invites varied surreal and real associations of this floating word. Though a painter of the highest regard, Ruscha's work is dominating by a conceptual bent that often questions the pursuit of painting. Ruscha said, "When I first became attracted to the idea of being an artist, painting was the last method, it was an almost obsolete, archaic form of communication. I felt newspapers, magazines, books, words, to be more meaningful that what some damn oil painter was doing." (Quoted in N. Benezra, "Ed Ruscha: Painting and Artistic License," Ed Ruscha, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 145) Damage is at once one of the most literal manifestations of the artist's struggle with the act of painting while simultaneously avoiding didacticism and keeping its ultimate message elusive and changing. Damage epitomizes all of the fundamental elements that make Ruscha's work so provocative.

The influence of car culture and his epic road trip between Oklahoma City and Los Angeles on Ruscha's painting is legendary. Zooming down the road, signs and gas stations sped past leaving only a fragmented impression. These impressions, brought to life in the form of Ruscha's single word paintings of the early 1960s like Damage, are some of the great icons of American landscape painting. Ruscha did not though stumble upon his signature subject in a vacuum.

The documentation of vernacular culture has long been a defining component of American art. Two of its great practitioners were Robert Frank and Walker Evans, both influences on Ruscha. Ruscha recalled, "I had taken photographs of a market sign on the corner of Alvarado and Sunset, where the Burrito King is, and they were dilapidated neon signs that were no longer in use...I was working with a photograph of a sign...Then I saw Robert Frank's Americans...Then I started seeing the works of Walker Evans, which had a profound effect on me...Then I saw Man Ray's work. All that came during school." (F. Fehlau, "Ed Ruscha- Interview," Flash Art, January/February 1988, p. 70 and 72) As Ruscha mined signs and signage for his paintings, he also took lessons away from his predecessors. Ruscha's paintings though maintain a unique vision within Pop Art and the greater history of art.

Beyond epitomizing Ruscha's best work of the 1960s, Damage is also a key painting in the development of Ruscha's iconography. Fire makes its first appearance in Damage. Fire becomes a ubiquitous symbol of Ruscha's work in the 1960s and going forward. Fire burns Standard Stations and culminates in the ultimate expression of ambivalence toward the art establishment with Los Angeles County Museum on Fire.

David Hickey writes, "On my way back to the hotel I decided that no artist was so in love with Magritte that he would set a service station, a restaurant, and the Los Angeles County Museum on fire. Then I realized that the L.A. County was in the business of "norms and standards" and that I had probably been wrong about the Standard station. It wasn't a standardized station but a station which dispensed standards, like a restaurant which served norms or a museum which did both. The Standard station was some kind of Orwellian church, perhaps. Obviously it didn't care for cheap Westerns and Ruscha did. Why else set these bastions of public morality ablaze with metaphysical fire?" (D. Hickey, "Available Light," The Works of Edward Ruscha, San Francisco, 1982, p. 24)

The slick mechanical feel of Pop Art has long been viewed as the response to the primalism of Abstract Expressionism. There was no longer anything at stake in Abstract Expressionism for Ruscha's generation. Ruscha summed up this sentiment when he said, "I liked painting that way, but there was no reason to push it any further." (N. Benezra, "Ed Ruscha: painting and Artistic License," Ed Ruscha, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 145)

As Kerry Brougher points out Damage can be viewed as the ultimate denouncement of the Abstract Expressionists' cult of the support and insistence on pure emotion over premeditation. "Space opens up more violently in Ruscha's 1964 painting Damage, which depicts the word on fire; the flames seem about to burn a hole in the issue of flatness, opening painting up to new possibilities." (K. Brougher, "Words as Landscape," Ed Ruscha, San Francisco, 2000, p. 166). This is not to say though that Ruscha despised Abstract Expressionism; by his own admission he was drawn to the style, but that he resented the "standards and norms" that the dogma of Clemente Greenberg's theoretical writings insisted upon.

The genius of Damage is the infinite possibilities it portrays. Meditating on this painting, Hickey points out the further ambiguity Damage portrays in the multiple layers of punning. "Ruscha said, 'I've never consciously tried to do a pun...except...except for the word 'damage' on fire. That's a pun I guess.' For a second I thought he was only referring to damaging the word 'damage,' but that's not a pun. The alternatives turned on the assumption that the flames were of 'damnation.' So the word damage could be the final result of damnation, or "damn age" could be a protest against aging, or "damned age" could be a commentary on contemporary reality. I tended to favor the latter. It made more sense in terms of the other things Ruscha had set on fire and related to the ironic apocalypse immanent in the more recent 'grand horizontal' paintings with their fiery David O. Selznick twilights. Also, the country we were driving through was suitably violent to imply any kind of damnation you might desire." (D. Hickey, "Available Light," The Works of Edward Ruscha, San Francisco, 1982, p. 29).


Ed Ruscha, Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire, 1965-68 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Walker Evans, Damaged, New York City, 1928-29 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive