Ed Ruscha valuation
Painted single words in a flat Los Angeles light, and photographed every building on the Sunset Strip.
Ed Ruscha was born in Omaha in 1937, grew up in Oklahoma City and drove to Los Angeles in 1956 to study commercial art.
What a work by Ed Ruscha is worth
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Bio
Ed Ruscha was born in Omaha in 1937, grew up in Oklahoma City and drove to Los Angeles in 1956 to study commercial art. The city gave him everything: the Standard station, the Hollywood sign, the flat sunset gradients, and the artist's books — Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip — which he printed himself in the early 1960s and which are now foundational to conceptual publishing. The word paintings put a single term in a designed typeface against a plain or atmospheric ground, and he has made them in gunpowder, blood, chocolate and axle grease as well as oil.
The artist's books are a distinct and important market: originally cheap, printed in editions of a few hundred to a few thousand, and now valued on printing, condition and whether the copy is signed — first printings in fine condition are far ahead of later ones. The prints, catalogued by Engberg, are extensive and well documented. Organic-medium works from the 1970s, made with food and other perishable materials, have real stability problems. Word paintings on canvas lead the market and depend on flawless flat surfaces.
The editions of the books, and Now Then
Twentysix Gasoline Stations, his first book, was printed in 1963 in 400 numbered copies, then in 1967 in 500 unnumbered copies and in 1969 in 3,000, and several of the other books were also reprinted in larger runs. The printing is therefore the first thing to establish: a numbered 1963 copy is a different object from a 1969 reprint, though the pages look alike.
The Museum of Modern Art's retrospective Ed Ruscha / Now Then, from September 2023 to January 2024, brought together more than 250 works made since 1958, among them paintings, drawings, prints, films, photographs, books and installation, and travelled on to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2024.
Chouinard, Ferus and the Venice pavilions
Ruscha studied at the Chouinard Art Institute from 1956 to 1960 under Robert Irwin and Emerson Woelffer, and edited the journal Orb there with Joe Goode. Seeing Jasper Johns's Target with Four Faces reproduced in Print magazine in 1957 turned him from graphic art to painting. He made his first word paintings in oil on paper in Paris in 1961, isolating single syllables such as ACE, BOSS, HONK and OOF. In 1962 Walter Hopps included him in New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum, one of the first Pop exhibitions in America, and the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles gave him his first solo show in 1963.
His first European solo show was at Galerie Rudolf Zwirner in Cologne in 1968, and he joined Leo Castelli in 1970. At the Venice Biennale that year he built Chocolate Room, 360 sheets of paper soaked in chocolate and hung on the walls, and in 1976 he wrote Vanishing Cream in petroleum jelly on a black wall; in 2005 he represented the United States there with the painting cycle Course of Empire. From 1980 he lettered in a squared-off capital typeface of his own, Boy Scout Utility Modern. His commissions include a series of fifty murals for the Miami-Dade Public Library, from 1985, and a seventy-panel work for Denver Public Library in 1995.
Best auction results
- Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half $68.3m
- Oil on canvas, 1964 · New York · November 2024
- Publicly reported
- The artist's auction record.
- Hurting the Word Radio #2 $52.5m
- Word painting, 1964 · New York · November 2019
- Publicly reported
- Including fees.
- Smash $30.4m
- Oil on canvas, 1963 · New York · November 2014
- Publicly reported
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
