Hurting the Word Radio #2

A word under pressure

Hurting the Word Radio #2 is a single word painted big: RADIO, in lemon-yellow capitals across a sky-blue canvas nearly five feet tall. Two of the letters are under attack. A painted C-clamp squeezes the R, and another pulls at the O, both rendered in trompe l'oeil so that the hardware looks bolted onto the surface of the picture.

Ruscha painted it in 1964 alongside a twin, Hurting the Word Radio #1, which is now in the Menil Collection in Houston. The Menil lists its version as oil on canvas, 59 1/8 by 55 1/8 inches. A related clamp painting, Not Only Securing the Last Letter But Damaging It as Well (Boss), belongs to the Museum Brandhorst in Munich. Within Ruscha's word paintings, the clamps are what set this small group apart: the word is not just shown, it is being bent.

The lettering is clean and graphic rather than brushy, closer to a billboard than to the gestural painting that dominated the 1950s. Writing around the 2019 sale compared the distortion to a word blurred by poor reception on a car radio.

The painter from Oklahoma City

Edward Joseph Ruscha IV was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on December 16, 1937, and spent about 15 years in Oklahoma City. In 1956, at 18, he drove to Los Angeles to go to art school, and he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute from 1956 through 1960 under Robert Irwin and Emerson Woelffer.

While still a student in 1957, he came across a reproduction of Jasper Johns's Target with Four Faces in Print magazine, which he has credited with turning him from graphic arts toward painting. After graduating he worked as a layout artist for the Carson-Roberts advertising agency in Los Angeles. In 1961 he spent seven months traveling in Europe, and his first word paintings, oils on paper, were made in Paris that year.

His commercial training shows in everything about this canvas: the typeface, the flat color, the trick of making a painted object look real. Ruscha has put it plainly: 'Some artists do roses, but I work primarily with words. We're surrounded by many more words than we are roses.'

Los Angeles, Ferus and Pop

In the early 1960s Los Angeles was not yet an art capital, and Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard was its most important address. Founded in 1957 by curator Walter Hopps, Shirley Hopps and artist Edward Kienholz, and later run by Irving Blum, Ferus gave Andy Warhol his first solo Pop exhibition, the Campbell's Soup Cans, in July 1962. Ruscha had his own first solo show there in 1963. He later compared the gallery to a jazz label with many distinct voices.

In 1962 Ruscha's work also hung beside Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine and Wayne Thiebaud in New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum, curated by Hopps and regarded as one of the first Pop Art exhibitions in America. Ruscha's choice of everyday words paralleled Warhol's soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, but from the other side of the country.

Hurting the Word Radio #2 was first exhibited at Ferus in 1964. The same year Ruscha also painted Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, which in 2024 would take his record away from this picture. Around this time words tied to electricity and car culture recur in his canvases, among them Flash, Voltage, Honk, Noise and Smash.

Fifty years with the Quinns

Joan and Jack Quinn were among the main patrons of Ferus and became friends with its artists, Ruscha included. They acquired Hurting the Word Radio #2 directly from him in the early 1970s and were its only owners until 2019. Jack Quinn (1932-2017) was a Southern California lawyer. Joan Quinn was a muse for Ruscha, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Hockney, among others, and in 1978 Andy Warhol made her West Coast editor of Interview magazine.

From 2013 through September 2019 the painting was on loan to the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries at the Huntington. It then went to auction for the first time, offered in New York with a presale estimate of $30 million to $40 million.

On November 13, 2019, bidding opened at $22 million and drew three telephone bidders. At $46 million the auctioneer joked to the room, 'Who needs an auctioneer?' The hammer fell at $46 million to an anonymous telephone bidder, and with fees the price was $52,485,000. It broke Ruscha's previous auction record of $30.4 million, set in 2014 by Smash (1963), another yellow-on-blue word painting.

Afterward Joan Quinn called the evening 'a tribute to the great artist Ed Ruscha and to my beloved husband Jack Quinn,' adding that her family had been 'blessed to enjoy "Radio" for the last 40 years.' Because the United States has no resale royalty law, Ruscha himself received nothing from the sale. The buyer has not been publicly identified.

Record, then benchmark

The 2019 price held as Ruscha's auction record for five years. On November 19, 2024, Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964) sold at auction in New York for $68,260,000 with fees, and the reports of that sale named Hurting the Word Radio #2 as the record it replaced.

By then Ruscha's standing was secure. He represented the United States at the 2005 Venice Biennale, received the J. Paul Getty Medal in 2019, and was the subject of the retrospective ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from September 2023 to January 2024, with more than 200 works.

His early word paintings are the core of that reputation, and this canvas is among the purest of them: one word, two colors, two clamps. Its twin hangs in a public museum in Houston, which makes the privately held #2 the one of the pair that can change hands.

The numbers

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

59 x 55 in. (149.9 x 139.7 cm) as listed by the 2019 seller's agent; one report gives 150 x 140.3 cm (59 x 55 1/4 in.)

Date

1964

Catalogue raisonne

Not stated in the sources consulted

Companion

Hurting the Word Radio #1, 1964, oil on canvas, 59 1/8 x 55 1/8 in., Menil Collection, Houston, 1971-30 DJ

Current owner

Private; the 2019 buyer was not publicly identified

Timeline

1. Dec 16, 1937

   Edward Joseph Ruscha IV is born in Omaha, Nebraska.

2. 1956

   Ruscha moves from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles and enrolls at the Chouinard Art Institute.

3. 1957

   Ferus Gallery opens on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles.

4. 1961

   Ruscha makes his first word paintings, oils on paper, in Paris.

5. 1962

   Ruscha shows in New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum.

6. 1963

   Ruscha has his first solo exhibition at Ferus Gallery and paints Smash.

7. 1964

   Ruscha paints Hurting the Word Radio #1 and #2; #2 is first exhibited at Ferus Gallery.

8. 2013

   The painting goes on loan to the Huntington's Virginia Steele Scott Galleries, where it stays through September 2019.

9. Nov 2014

   Smash (1963) sets a Ruscha auction record of $30.4 million in New York.

10. 2017

    Jack Quinn dies.

11. Oct 2, 2019

    The painting is announced for sale with an estimate of $30 million to $40 million, its first time at auction.

12. Nov 13, 2019

    It sells at auction in New York for $52,485,000 with fees, a record for the artist.

13. Sep 2023

    ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

14. Nov 19, 2024

    Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half sells for $68,260,000, replacing this painting as Ruscha's auction record.

The world in 1964

• Jan 11, 1964

  The U.S. Surgeon General reports that smoking may be hazardous to health, the government's first such statement.

• Feb 9, 1964

  The Beatles make their first live American television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, seen by an estimated 73 million viewers.

• Feb 25, 1964

  Cassius Clay beats Sonny Liston in Miami Beach to become heavyweight champion; he soon announces his name is Muhammad Ali.

• Mar 27, 1964

  The Good Friday earthquake, magnitude 9.2, strikes South Central Alaska.

• Apr 7, 1964

  IBM announces the System/360 computer.

• Apr 22, 1964

  The New York World's Fair opens.

• Jul 2, 1964

  President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Hurting the Word Radio #2 is number 11 of 100 in the art entries of the FLOAT 100. 88 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (11 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• There are two Hurting the Word Radio paintings from 1964; the other one, #1, is in the Menil Collection in Houston.
• Bidding was so fast that at $46 million the auctioneer asked the room, 'Who needs an auctioneer?'
• The previous Ruscha record, set in 2014, was held by a painting called Smash.
• Joan Quinn, who owned the painting with her husband, was hired by Andy Warhol in 1978 as West Coast editor of Interview magazine.
• Because the United States has no resale royalty law, Ruscha received nothing from the $52.5 million sale.
• Before the sale, the painting spent about six years on loan to the Huntington.
• Ruscha's very first word paintings were oils on paper made in Paris in 1961.