Mocha Standard,

1969

Ruscha is a multidisciplinary artist recognized both for bridging the techniques of fine art and graphic design and for combining the concerns of Pop art (a movement from the 1960s) with the Conceptual art movement of the 1970s. Trained as an illustrator, Ruscha employed the processes of commercial printmaking—such as the "split-fountain" technique seen here—to achieve areas of solid, flat color layered with smoothly blended gradations of differently colored inks. He created multiple versions of this print of a Standard gasoline station; reusing the screens for the print allowed him to experiment with varied colors and compositions. The gas station is Ruscha’s most iconic subject and the focus of his first artist’s book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), which reproduces a series of banal photographs taken on a drive from Los Angeles to his hometown of Oklahoma City and serves as a typology of the postwar American landscape framed by the window of the automobile. Choosing one of those pictures, later that year he painted the large-scale landscape Standard Station, which became the basis for the series of screenprints that includes Mocha Standard.