About This Artwork

Ed Ruscha (American, born 1937)
printed by Art Krebs, Los Angeles
published by Audrey Sabol, Villanova, Pennsylvania

Standard Station, 1966

Color screenprint on ivory wove paper
494 x 935 mm (image); 647 x 1009 mm (sheet)
Harold Joachim Purchase Fund, 1974.59b

Engberg 5 I/I

Standard Station was the first print on which Ruscha collaborated with a publisher, who financed the edition but left the execution up to the artist. Ruscha's book of photographs Twenty-six Gasoline Stations, specifically the page depicting a Standard Oil station in Amarillo, Texas, provided the model for this print and for a painting he made in 1963. Of particular note is the execution of the graded sky colors. Ruscha achieved this effect through the use of a "split fountain," a technique of blending ink to create a rainbow effect. Originally created for commercial printing (the split fountain had been used in commercial lithographic and screenprinting shops for many years), Ruscha was one of the first to adapt it to fine-art printing. As the art historian Riva Castleman has pointed out, the garish rainbow effect achieved by Ruscha in this print was so often imitated that, by the late 1960s, it had become a printing cliché.