Ed Ruscha

Absolut Ruscha

1988

Niki de Saint Phalle My Love We Wont, 1968 Lithograph and silkscreen on wove paper Signed and numbered 51/75 in graphite pencil on the front Frame included: elegantly floated and framed in a museum quality white wood frame with UV plexiglass From the Brooklyn Museum, which has an edition of this work in its permanent collection: "Throughout her long and prolific career Niki de Saint Phalle, a former cover model for Life magazine and French Vogue, investigated feminine archetypes and women’s societal roles. Her Nanas, bold, sexy sculptures...

Robert Indiana LOVE in Central Park, New York, 1971 Color lithograph on wove paper. Pencil signed, dated and numbered with LOVE drawing/flourish Hand-signed by artist, Pencil signed, dated and numbered 66/ 89. Also bears a drawing of the stacked letters LOVE in pencil. Bears Robert Indiana's copyright Published by Robert Indiana and printed by the American Poster Company to raise money for Central Park 39 × 30 inches Unframed This impressively large 1971 lithograph - pencil signed and numbered from the limited edition of only 89, with a stacked LOVE drawing on the front - depicts Robert Indiana's iconic LOVE sculpture (from the permanent collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art) when it was exhibited at Central Park in New York City. This was the turn of the decade of the 1970s - during the height of the anti-Vietnam War protests of the Nixon Administration, when the presence of Indiana's monumental cor-ten steel LOVE in Central Park took on a much deeper significance in New York and indeed the country. This important print is pencil signed, dated and numbered by Robert Indiana from the very small edition of only 89. It also bears a drawing - a flourish - of the word LOVE written by the artist in pencil. Very few of the signed editions of this print remain -- so it is rarely seen on the market. Indeed, eighty nine (89) is a very small edition; however, this oversized print was used for promotional purposes in public places, so very few of the 89 signed and numbered works remain - let alone with the original stacked love drawing. . If you LOVE Robert Indiana...

This is a truly historic limited edition hand signed museum print from the 1960s - of the first North American building the legendary artists Christo ever wrapped: Christo Wrap In Wr...

Ben Schonzeit Yankee Flame, from the portfolio: America: the Third Century, 1975 Collotype on wove paper Pencil signed and numbered 50/200 on the front Publisher: APC Editions, Chermayeff & Geismar Associates, Inc Printer: Triton Press 27 × 19 3/10 inches Unframed Note: this is the original hand signed and numbered collotype; not to be confused with the separate (unsigned) poster edition. This hand-signed, numbered and dated collotype in colors by photorealist pioneer artist Ben Schonzeit was created in 1975 for the portfolio America: the Third Century, commissioned by Mobil Oil Corporation in which 13 American artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and others created works celebrating America's bicentennial. Yankee Flame combines the iconic images of George Washington, Coca-Cola and the Statue of Liberty into a collaged interpretation of contemporary American life and the meaning of freedom. "Yankee Flame" is in excellent condition and never framed. It was acquired as part of the America: The Third Century full portfolio. Ben Schonzeit (b. 1942, Brooklyn, New York) is one of the original Photorealist painters and is considered to have pioneered the airbrush technique. His works often depict still life arrangements that are intentionally out of focus. He received his B.F.A. from The Cooper Union in 1964 and has since had over 50 solo exhibitions both in the United States and abroad. His paintings are held in numerous museum collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1973 Nancy Hoffman introduced me to Ben Schonzeit in the backroom of her gallery on West Broadway. She had been open less than a year, and Ben was one of the artists in her original stable. His large Crab Blue It had arrived from his studio a few days earlier and was leaning against the wall. I thought at the time it was one of the most impressive, virtuosic Photorealist works I had seen. That first encounter was more than a quarter of a century ago and I have always considered it to be one of the quintessential, tour de force paintings of American Photorealism. In the early seventies one could stand on West Broadway on any pleasant, sunny weekday and see less than a dozen people on the street between the Nancy Hoffman Gallery and OK Harris Works of Art. Almost all of the SoHo galleries, such as Leo Castelli, Paula Cooper, Ward-Nasse, and Ivan Karp’s Hundred Acres, could be visited in an afternoon. At night the streets were almost deserted. With the exception of Andy Warhol, there were no art world superstars. More importantly, none of the artists expected to achieve celebrity status. That was a phenomenon of the eighties and nineties. There were a only a handful of restaurants and watering holes, such Elephant and Castle, Fanelli’s, the Spring Street Bar and Prince Street Bar. Fanelli’s closed on weekends, which was a holdover from their sweatshop clientele during lunch and ragtag group of artists in the evenings. In those early days of SoHo, the drafty, raw sweatshop spaces with their large windows, rough floors, and service elevators provided large, inexpensive living quarters and studios for many artists. Unlike today, there were no boutiques. The area was not chic and with the exception of Lowell Nesbett’s showplace, the lofts were not glamorous. Schonzeit was in the same living and working space the he now occupies when I first visited him, but SoHo was a very different time and place. When the National Endowment of the Arts recommended me to curate America 1976, which turned into one of the major visual arts projects for the Bicentennial, Ben Schonzeit was on the first list of participants I made up for the U.S. Department of the Interior. His large diptych, Continental Divide, was one of the most memorable works produced for the exhibit. I stopped by his studio four or five times while it was in progress and have visited him many times over the years. We have maintained a very cordial working relationship and friendship over the past three decades. I saw The Music Room exhibit in 1978 and realized at the time that the vigorously rendered mural sized canvases and mirror and related works represented a major catharsis in his painting. In many ways, it and the other paintings and drawings based on the same image represented a sharp, decisive break with the tenets of Photorealism, or at least the photo-replicative aspects that had been so widely heralded in America and abroad in the mid-seventies. Over the years we have continued to work together. He has been in almost all of the major exhibitions I have curated here and abroad and in almost all of the books I have written. I am familiar with his studio habits, his quiet, internalized restlessness that manifests itself in the hundreds of small, unknown drawings and watercolors, doodles on napkins during lunch, and imaginary landscapes. I also know that he would rather do a painting than think or talk about it. Over the years I have followed the shifts in his studio procedure from the monumental airbrushed fruit and vegetable paintings to the most recent bouquets of flowers and decorative paintings. Our discussions of these matters tends to lapse into a verbal shorthand at this point. The following essay is based on both my longstanding familiarity and admiration for his work and involvement with contemporary realism and figurative painting. A booklet of color xeroxes with notes made up by Schonzeit was extremely helpful. In addition to several interviews, much of the information unfolded through a lengthy series of Emails. Due to our different working habits these were composed and sent out very late at night and answered by Ben the following morning. They dealt with the specifics of many of the paintings, generalities, his background and childhood in Brooklyn, and occasional bits of art world gossip. And there were odd discoveries. Prior to discussing his witty, tongue in cheek painting of Buffalo Bill, I did not know or had long forgotten that William Cody...

This print depicts the tangle of barbed wire encircling curling and twisting neon, with lengths of wood at the center. The dark paper sets off the electric blue, and captures the ori...

A very good impression of this color lithograph on Italia handmade paper. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 35/41 in pencil by Rosenquist. Printed and published by ULAE, West Islip,...

A very good impression of this color lithograph. Signed and numbered 125/175 in pencil, lower margin.

TIMELINE DEGA MAN is an original hand drawn lithograph by Peter Max printed using traditional hand lithography techniques on archival paper, 100% acid...