This small display celebrates the British Museum’s acquisition of ‘Insects’, a portfolio of six colour prints by the American artist Ed Ruscha, with a few other works to give them context.

Swarm of red ants from ‘Insects’ by Ed Ruscha (1972)

Ruscha came to prominence in the early 1960s when he was associated with pop art, the movement which made art out of the everyday, from adverts, hoardings, cartoons and newspapers and the mass media generally, movie stars etc. He has always been associated with printmaking. The series Insects was made in 1972. It’s a classic example of his tendency to create works in sets or projects.

Flies by Ed Ruscha from ‘Insects’ (1972)

Ed Ruscha biography

Ed Ruscha was born in 1937. In 1956, aged just 18, Ruscha moved from Oklahoma City in the South Central US to Los Angeles, the West Coast city with which he is most closely associated and where he has been based ever since.

The near 1,400-mile journey along Route 66 would become very familiar to him over years of travelling back and forth and inspire his first artist’s book, ‘Twenty-six Gasoline Stations’. Self-published in 1963, this cheaply printed paperback contained black-and-white photographs of the filling stations littered along the famous highway, and the worn-out, everyday modernism of their design.

Some of the 26 gasoline stations by Ed Ruscha (1963)

In Los Angeles Ruscha trained in commercial graphic design. Ever since those early days, roads, cars, gas stations, signs and billboard advertisements have occurred frequently in Ruscha’s art across a variety of media including painting, printmaking, photography, drawing and film.

Insects

Insects is a portfolio of six colour screen-prints depicting life-sized flies, ants and cockroaches. They are depicted with very prominent shadows to give the naturalistic illusion of three-dimensional bugs resting, swarming or scuttling across flat surfaces. Printed in 1972, the portfolio is displayed here in full. It was acquired by the British Museum in 2023 as a gift from a private collector in memory of Paul Thomson to the American Friends of the British Museum.

Cockroaches from ‘Insects’ by Ed Ruscha (1972)

The unexpected subject matter is refreshing, but so is the treatment. Although they’re insects we might encounter in everyday life, we would never see them staged and arranged in such a subtly artificial way. So they’re a pleasing mix of naturalism and contrivance.

Another very appealing aspect of the works is that some of them are painted on paper-backed wood veneer. This is like the fake wood finish you get on tables in cheap cafés but it makes an interesting surface to examine up close, far more interesting and suggestive than plain cartridge or print paper.

Rusty Signs

The display includes not only some documentary material from Ruscha’s early career, and the cover of the Insects portfolio, but also a portfolio of seven soft-ground etchings from 2001 titled ‘Los Francisco San Angeles’. In these Ruscha creates imaginary maps that intersect the principal roads of LA and San Francisco. These made almost no impression on me.

Far more impressive are the two prints from the six prints in Ruscha’s 2014 series of Rusty Signs. These were produced at the Mixografia Print Studio in Los Angeles, and bring together his interest in graphic design, signage, the American cult of the open road and visual illusions.

Dead End II from ‘Rusty Signs’ by Ed Ruscha (2014)

The prints were made using a proprietary process developed at Mixografia. Ruscha drew each sign using a font of his own design which he calls Boy Scout Utility Modern and superimposed them onto corroded metal before the printing plates were produced. The finished plates were carefully inked to suggest the weathering of the metal and passed through the press with wet handmade paper under great pressure.

Cash for Tools from ‘Rusty Signs’ by Ed Ruscha (2014)

I grew up in a petrol station with a tyre bay, amid the smells of petrol and oil, car exhausts, the smell of swarfega, the rainbow sheen of oil on puddles, the punching sound of the pneumatic machines which undid car wheel nuts or screwed tyres off their wheels.

Hence my strong partiality for industrial art, art made from industrial scraps like the Italian Arte Povera movement, for wrecked modern buildings like the ones in Louise and Jane Wilson’s brilliant black-and-white photos.

The curators say the Rusty Signs symbolise ‘downturn and decline’, and even make the grand claim that they’re some kind of statement about ‘the American Dream’. What American dream? Can they read the newspapers? Do they follow the news?

Anyway, backing off from that kind of social interpretation, these are lovely works and the art speaks for itself. The tiny ants, each casting a perfect shadow on the paper-backed wood veneer, say enough. The choice of subject matter, the medium and the perfect finish are the point.

Similarly, the almost physical sense of age and weathering given by the Rusty Signs, combines in the mind with the knowledge that they are not in fact real signs found by the side of the road, but entirely artificial creations, to create a complex psychological pleasure.

Understanding how they’re made and something about their intention is useful, probably, adding depth and resonance. But in the end the artworks speak for themselves, evoking unique memories and associations in everyone who sees them, in different ways – for me, with great emotional power and nostalgia.

Related links

• Ed Ruscha: Roads and Insects continues in Room 90a at the British Museum until 28 January
• Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire @ the National Gallery (June 2018)
• Ed Ruscha Wikipedia article