Edward RuschaAmerican, 1937Highland, Franklin, Yucca
Can I see it?
Not on view at present
Where is “Highland, Franklin, Yucca” now? Collection: Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge. Not on view at present. Checked September 29, 2026.
Cambridge, United States
It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.
- Checked
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum
About the painting
When Ruscha moved to Los Angeles in 1956 to study commercial design at the Chouinard Art Institute, he was drawn to the proliferation of visual and textual information in the urban landscape. He began to examine language, pop culture, and Hollywood’s distinctive streets and architecture, notably in his 1960s photography books, prints, and paintings. Highland, Franklin, Yucca builds on this earlier work. Here Ruscha derived the textual diagram from Hollywood’s street grid, while he copied the landscape from a book on the Himalayas. As Ruscha has suggested, the mountains also evoke the snowcapped peak of the Paramount Pictures film studio logo. The smoky beige cloud, however, interferes with the legibility crucial for commercial logos. Unlike commercial design, Ruscha’s painting confuses rather than communicating a clear message. Its conflicting modes of visual presentation mimic the experience of processing disjunctive information in the contemporary urban world.
Harvard Art Museums
Details
- Accession number
- 2000.240
In the catalog
Sources
- Harvard Art Museums
- Image: Harvard Art Museums — © President and Fellows of Harvard College
In the life of Edward Ruscha
The whole life1998
Getty: a retrospective of drawings and “Picture Without Words”
The J. Paul Getty Museum organises a retrospective devoted solely to his works on paper, and he is commissioned to produce a nearly thirty-foot (about 9 m) high vertical painting, “PICTURE WITHOUT WORDS”, for the lobby of the Harold M. Williams Auditorium of the Getty Center.
1999–2001
Retrospectives at the Walker Art Center, the Hirshhorn and the Reina Sofía
In 1999 the Walker Art Center mounts “Edward Ruscha: Editions 1959–1999”, a survey of his prints, books and graphic works (well over 300), the show travels to LACMA in 2000, and Ruscha co-authors the catalogue raisonné with curator Siri Engberg. A retrospective follows at the Hirshhorn Museum in 2000 and at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 2001.
2000
The Achenbach Foundation buys his complete graphic archive
The Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, buys the complete graphic archive of 325 prints and 800 working proofs for $10 million, funded by the philanthropist Phyllis Wattis, and negotiates for impressions of future prints.
