On November 19th, Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964) will be sold as part of Christie’s 20th-century evening sale in New York. The work, which is the last of Ruscha’s large-scale 1960s paintings in private hands, is estimated to be worth more than $50 million.
The current owner, Texas-based oil heir and investor Sid R. Bass, acquired the painting in 1976 through a trade of another piece from the same series, according to The Wall Street Journal. It comes to auction shortly after being featured as part of the artist’s retrospective, “Ed Ruscha / Now Then,” at the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2023–24.
“Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half represents the synthesis and peak of Ruscha’s masterpieces of the early 1960s,” said Max Carter, Christie’s vice chairman of 20th and 21st-century art. “It is an icon—of Ruscha’s art, of paradox, of the post-war era. Offering it this fall at Christie’s is once-in-a-lifetime.”
Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half captures a Standard Oil gas station along Route 66 in Amarillo, Texas. Ruscha discovered this particular station during his trips between his residence in Los Angeles and his family visits in Oklahoma City. He frequently paused to photograph landscapes, pitstops, and scenes that epitomized American culture, several of which became the subject of his paintings. The same Standard Oil station is depicted in his 1963 painting Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas (1963).
Ruscha’s auction record was set in 2019 when his Hurting the Word Radio #2 (1964) sold for $52.5 million at Christie’s. Meanwhile, the artist’s 1968 painting Marble Shatters Drinking Glass will be sold at Christie’s during the same week, arriving from the collection of the late New York–based collector Mica Ertgun. A price estimate for that work has yet to be announced.
