Double Standard

Ed Ruscha is a California-based artist whose work is associated with the Pop art movement. Standard Station marks the first time that Ruscha collaborated with a print 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 as well as a painting he made in 1963. Perhaps the most notable feature of the print version of the image is the gradation of the colors in the sky. Ruscha achieved this effect through the “Split-Fountain” technique, which blends ink to create a rainbow effect. The technique originated in commercial printing and had been used in lithographic and screenprinting shops for many years, but Ruscha was one of the first to use it in fine-art printing. As art historian Riva Castleman has pointed out, the garish rainbow effect achieved by Ruscha in this print was so often imitated by other artists that, by the late 1960s, it had become a printing cliché.