Beschreibung:

Ed Ruscha Ship Talk 1988 acrylic on canvas 142.2 x 341 cm (55 7/8 x 134 1/4 in.) Signed and dated 'Ed Ruscha 1988' on the reverse. Annotated 'Ed Ruscha 1988 "SHIP TALK"' on the stretcher.
Provenance Mos Food Services, Tokyo Paul Rusconi, Los Angeles Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles Sandroni Rey, Los Angeles Andrew and Lea Fastow, Houston Christie's, New York, November 13, 2007, Lot 66 Private Collection Christie's, London, February 14, 2012, Lot 43 Acquired by the present owner from the above Exhibited Nagoya, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Edward Ruscha, October-December 1988, then traveled to Tokyo, Touko Museum of Contemporary Art (1989) Bulleen, Australia, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Downtown: Ruscha, Rooney, Arkley, 1995 Houston, The Menil Collection, extended loan, 2001 Austin, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, extended loan, 2006 Literature Edward Ruscha, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Arts, Nagoya: 1988, pp. 42-3 (illustrated) T. Kinoshita, Edward Ruscha, Bijutsu Techo, 1989, P. 39 (illustrated) J. Gibson, "Los Melbos", Art & Text, 1995, pp. 20-1 (illustrated) Downtown: Ruscha, Rooney, Arkley, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen: 1995, p. 15 (illustrated) R. Dean and L. Turvey, Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume 4: 1988-1992, New York: 2009, cat. no. P1988.31, pp. 82-3 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay The tall ship has a long history of artistic representation. From the maritime painting of the Dutch Golden Age to that of nineteenth century Romanticism, it has persisted as a ready subject for aestheticization. Perhaps more curiously, it is a recurrent form in the painting of Ed Ruscha Discussing its origins in his work, the artist acknowledges a broad receptivity: ‘I get the imagery from all sources. I may have seen several ships and then I’ll work on a drawing, change it, put some masts over here, a sail here ... The images just come from anywhere – a magazine, a photograph of an old ship.’ (Ed Ruscha in Bill Berkson, ‘Ed Ruscha,' Alexandra Schwartz (ed.), Leave Any Information at the Signal, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004, p.275-276). In 1983, Ruscha painted Brave Men Run In My Family. A work in oil, it overlaid the titular phrase on an optimistic maritime scene: sails billowing against a swathe of blue sky. Several years later, the ship returned in a series of altogether more brooding compositions. Instances of the artist’s silhouette paintings, pieces like Brother, Sister (1987), Parts per Trillion (1987), and the present lot saw Ruscha use an airbrush to produce hazy black-and-white designs. Ship Talk finds three vessels precariously balanced atop an improbably curved seascape. The boats are both imperilled and threatening, recalling a painterly tradition of ships desperately adrift amid storm-struck oceans. Yet the scene depicted is not the chaos of a naval battle; its tone is less frenetic, more unnerving. It reveals a tendency in Ruscha’s work to link the nautical and the spectral – a tendency most striking in his 1986 painting Ghost Ship. The ship envisaged in both pieces is remarkably similar: a shadowy silhouette, banking to the side. It is beguilingly inaccessible, possessed of a ghostliness that is typical of Ruscha. His pieces often seem haunted: empty yet reverberating with memory. Amongst these resonances is the maritime painting of Caspar David Friedrich particularly his pieces Segelschiff (1815) and Schiffe auf Reed (1816-17). In both, the Romantic painter uses a muted palette to imbue his ships with an eerie silence. Human forms are in retreat; here, as in Ship Talk, one senses an indefinable presence in their place. Discussing Brother, Sister and the subject of his ship paintings, Ruscha makes a careful distinction: ‘they’re not about my experience because I ain’t a sailor. The ship is my interpretation of a picture of a ship rather than a ship. It’s like a painting of an idea about a ship.’ (Ed Ruscha in Guy Cross, ‘Pronounce His Name Rew-Shay,' Alexandra Schwartz (ed.), Leave Any Information at the Signal, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004, p.33). This casts light on the paintings’ ghostliness; shrouded in haze, the sh