“Most of the films I saw at that time were black and white. I’ve got a vivid memory of what they looked like on a big screen and the silvery feeling that I got from them; I’m sure it had everything to do with my thoughts about painting...”
ED RUSCHA

A singular voice distilling America’s vast visual lexicon, Ed Ruscha’s presence as a stalwart of contemporary art has cemented his place as one of the most important artists of his generation. Producing an oeuvre as prolific as it is profound; Ruscha’s work has ranged from his wry observations of consumer culture to his breathtaking paintings of the American landscape. His signature word and letter paintings are portrayed in myriad tones and styles, against backdrops both simple and stunningly complex. Ruscha has, on occasion, delved into the depths of pictorial language alone, expressing a cinematic sensibility, as demonstrated in this painting from 1990, Anchor Stuck in Sand. In an ongoing exploration of perspective and cinema, the artist has distilled an extension of this development into a body of works indebted to the language of film. Ruscha’s ode to Hollywood pictures range from the production of iconic Hollywood hills signs to silhouettes of adventurebound pirate ships, stoic teepees, and hushed scenes of solemn-looking homes reminiscent of film noir.

In addition—and in terms of its subjective content—the present lot is a counterpoint to many of Ruscha’s contemporaneous works. Prior to the late 1980s, Ruscha had immersed himself into the pictorial nature of the written letter and its obvious progression, the word. Yet here, the pendulum swings in the other direction, and we see Ruscha working in a more abstracted context, one where groundbreaking technique can be married with pith of subject in order to achieve a unique piece of art; one where nostalgia, sadness, and somber beauty intersect with the utmost visual eloquence: “The silhouette paintings that Ruscha began to paint in the mideighties dramatize the mechanics of viewing as a mixture of prototypical processes and archetypal images.” (B. Fer, “Mothman: Ruscha’s Light and Dark”, Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Edited by Robert Dean and Lisa Turvey, Gottingen, 2009, p. 7).

Here, Ruscha's carefully selected imagery is an Anchor Stuck in Sand, partially obscured, sunken into the cold recesses of an ocean shoreline. There is no evidence of the ship that was once tethered to the anchor’s position, yet the image retains our attention so readily and with a command so great that we need not search for any further narrative. At the upperright corner of the painting, Ruscha airbrushes the solemn hues of an impending dawn, gradually fading to twilight. Conceding to a landlocked fate, Ruscha fades the corporeal-like figure into the melancholy atmosphere, leading to the cold dunes.

Certainly, the symbolism of the anchor carries far more weight than one might suspect, powerfully suggestive in its cinematic language, the significance of this object can be interpreted as the artist’s emotional anchoring to the West coast, a place that has inspired Ruscha for decades. The artist has described the early Los Angeles art scene of the 1950s and 1960s as “a cultural dry spot, the Australia of the art world – way out there, very small and undeveloped.” (Ed Ruscha, in M. Gayford, “Ruscha: interview”, The Telegraph, September 25, 2009) It is precisely this initial appreciation of large open expanses of desolate undeveloped land that has inspired the production of Ruscha’s most iconic work. With this in mind, Ruscha’s ingenious rendering brings us to sympathize with our submerged protagonist. His image—through its instantly recognizable profile, shrouded in visual clichés of maritime films and photography, holds the power of cinema in a single frame. Ruscha has admitted that “seeing things photographically” has influenced the way he works as an artist.

In an ongoing exploration of perspective and cinema, the artist has distilled an extension of this development into a body of works indebted to the language of film. Ruscha’s ode to Hollywood pictures range from the production of iconic Hollywood hills signs to silhouettes of adventure-bound pirate ships, stoic teepees, and solemn-looking rural homes. Ruscha conjures countless associations with the dawn of the captured image. The present lot is a testament to Ruscha’s fantastic ability to explore the fine lines between genres and translate them into art: “Again the artist had found an approach that barely avoids being illustrative, that finds a space between representation, abstraction, and design.” (K. Brougher, “Words as Landscape”, Ed Ruscha, New York, 2000, p. 172) He fuses the notion of artistic nostalgia with a sense of magic, where we cannot differentiate what is real and what is out of focus. Anchor Stuck in Sand, 1990, is more than a somber portrait of a displaced object, it is the image-based retelling of a tragic figure, one wasting away in uselessness on a bank at dawn: “Light and shadow, which would traditionally have been rendered in painting’s most refined techniques to describe three-dimensional forms on a two dimensional plane…now tend to flatten things out. They create a fairly shallow sliver of space, in which shadows seem to play across a screen rather than open onto a fictional space beyond, or behind, the picture.”(B. Fer, “Mothman: Ruscha’s Light and Dark”, Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Edited by Robert Dean and Lisa Turvey, Gottingen, 2009, p.7)

In this way, the present lot embodies the significance and weight of the West coast, created by one of the most influential west coast artists of the twentieth century and collected by one of the most powerful patrons of post-war and contemporary art, California native, Robert A. Rowan. An avid collector, Rowan was a sustaining force behind the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which exhibited Anchor Stuck in Sand during Ruscha’s 1990 retrospective. Ruscha himself has pronounced a similar fondness for mid-century works, a particular early influence being the black and white Abstract Expressionist paintings of Franz Kline. Though his early Expressionist influence became more obscured as he approached his mature style in the mid-1960’s, Ruscha resurrects the chromatic scheme of one of his earliest influences in the present lot. Ruscha’s technique also departs from his more familiar style of employing the conventional brushstroke to achieve the result of his canvases. He began, in the early 1980’s, to use an airbrush as commercial technique. Giving a blurred impression of an object or landscape without the definitions of lines or edges, Ruscha’s airbrush attains an intentional distancing of the observer and the observed, where a relationship must grow rather than simply be. Here, Ruscha’s combination of technique and subject imbue his composition with a cinematic romanticism. Ruscha’s anchor may be stuck beneath the sands of time, but his sail is free to navigate an ever-more magnificent realm of expression.