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Lot Essay
Ed Ruscha's masterfully painted Honk from 1962 is a defining example of the crucial developmental years of Pop art in America, particularly on the West Coast. In these early post-war years (defined concisely in Hand Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955-1962 by exhibition organizers Paul Schimmel and Donna DeSalvo), Pop art painters emerged with a fresh definition of art, but with undeniable ties to their Abstract Expressionist predecessors. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg loaded their brushes with dripping paint, Roy Lichtenstein meticulously rendered endless "benday dots" by hand, and Andy Warhol subverted machine-made commercial advertisements by hand-painting the imagery.
In Honk, 1962, Ed Ruscha incorporates the then cutting-edge Pop devices of "word as object," the use of a commercial brand label, and the isolation of a commercial object, but assimilates them into his early painterly expressionistic style. The imagery in this painting seems to reflect a very personal response to the West Coast car culture and the influence of Hollywood surrounding Ed Ruscha in these years. The word HONK punches out of the sound of a car horn from the sumptuous chocolate brown layers of paint. A crackerjack box (bought at the drive-in movies?) flies across the canvas leaving a wake of paint in its path. Honk's word/product compostion is evocative of other blockbuster works of 1962 including Actual Size, in which a can of Spam rockets across the painting, and Fisk in which a tire bounds through the canvas.
Consistent with Ed Ruscha's greatest works, Honk is a painting which defies clear categorization. It succeeds in the rare arena of hand-painted Pop, and embraces the 1960's West Coast aesthetic and culture with wit and humor in signature Ruscha style.
In Honk, 1962, Ed Ruscha incorporates the then cutting-edge Pop devices of "word as object," the use of a commercial brand label, and the isolation of a commercial object, but assimilates them into his early painterly expressionistic style. The imagery in this painting seems to reflect a very personal response to the West Coast car culture and the influence of Hollywood surrounding Ed Ruscha in these years. The word HONK punches out of the sound of a car horn from the sumptuous chocolate brown layers of paint. A crackerjack box (bought at the drive-in movies?) flies across the canvas leaving a wake of paint in its path. Honk's word/product compostion is evocative of other blockbuster works of 1962 including Actual Size, in which a can of Spam rockets across the painting, and Fisk in which a tire bounds through the canvas.
Consistent with Ed Ruscha's greatest works, Honk is a painting which defies clear categorization. It succeeds in the rare arena of hand-painted Pop, and embraces the 1960's West Coast aesthetic and culture with wit and humor in signature Ruscha style.