$50 M. Ed Ruscha from Oil Heir’s Collection to Sell at Christie’s

Ed Ruscha’s 1964 painting Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half will be offered for sale at auction next month in New York, with an estimated price of $50 million, Christie’s announced on Monday.

The painting will be among the most valuable lots in the auction house’s 20th-century evening sale on November 19.

The owner of the work is Texas-based oil heir and investor Sid R. Bass, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported that Bass traded another Ruscha from the same series in 1976 for the current one he’s now selling. It’s the last of Ruscha’s large-scale works produced in the 1960s that is still privately owned.

The work is coming up for sale after Bass loaned it to organizers of the traveling exhibition “Ed Ruscha / Now Then,” a retrospective of his work spanning 1958–2022, which debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and went to LACMA last year.

Max Carter, Christie’s vice chairman of 20th and 21st century art, described the gas-station painting as the “peak” of Ruscha’s early period. Many of his early works focused on Los Angeles, where he came to study art in 1956 after leaving Oklahoma City.

The estimate comes close to Ruscha’s current auction record, set in 2019 when Hurting the Word Radio #2 (1964) sold for $52.5 million at Christie’s.

Another painting from the 1960s by Ruscha, Marble Shatters Drinking Glass (1968) will be sold at Christie’s in the same week from the holdings of Mica Eretgun, a New York-based collector and widow of music executive Ahmet Ertegun, who died in 2006. Mica, the executor of his estate, died in December 2023. An estimate price for that work has not been disclosed.