THE MASTER OF TEXT-BASED ART FOUND HIS MUSE IN LA’S FAMED SIGNAGE, AS SEEN IN A STRIKING PAIR OF WORKS MAKING THEIR AUCTION DEBUT
By Rainey Knudson | November 4, 2025
By the 1980s, the Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha was already two decades into a storied career as one of the leading artists in the United States. Known for his wry use of the everyday and his combinations of landscape and text, his work was shot through with the crisp, graphic sensibility of his early training in advertising design. Perhaps more than any other West Coast artist, Ruscha used the city of Los Angeles – its myths and dreams, and by extension the myths and dreams of America – as the primary subject matter of his art.
Ruscha was known for throwing legendary parties at his studio on Western Avenue in Hollywood. The studio had a direct view of the Hollywood sign, and at the time, he said that if he could see the sign out the window, he’d know it was safe to go outside. Otherwise, it was too smoggy and he should stay indoors. Always alert to irony, he recognized that the Los Angeles smog made for spectacular sunsets, the colors of which he would revisit again and again in his work.
Ed Ruscha (b. 1937), ‘Blue Hollywood,’ 1983. Dry pigment on paper. 10-1/2 x 31-1/2 inches (26.7 x 80.0 cm) (sheet). Available in Heritage’s November 19 Modern & Contemporary Art Signature® Auction.
One night in the early 1980s, Ruscha threw a big party after an opening, and he asked his friends at Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe to cater the event. Lucy’s was an obvious choice. The restaurant, founded by Frank and Lucy Casado in 1964 at 5536 Melrose Avenue, was a cultural and political hub in the city. A simple neighborhood family spot, it was situated near the Desilu and Paramount studios, at the edge of a neighborhood that was, at the time, home to the upper echelon of Los Angeles – the Chandlers, the O’Malleys, the Ahmansons – and was also right around the corner from Ruscha’s studio.
Lucy’s had become an improbable crossroads for LA’s power players and creative communities. Regulars spanned music, film, television, literature, politics, and art. Iconic artists like Ruscha, John Baldessari, Joe Goode, and Don Bachardy mixed with writers like Christopher Isherwood, musician Jackson Browne, politician Jerry Brown, and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, a close family friend of the Casados. The homey restaurant hosted political events and functioned as a kind of living room for frequent celebrations and memorials.
Frank and Lucy’s daughter Patricia Casado remembers, “It was just this little restaurant on Melrose that somehow brought together all these different worlds, and it all happened over a meal. Feeding people gave them a way to talk to each other, to see each other as human beings instead of headlines. Everything important in that place happened over food.”
Ed Ruscha and Patricia Casado at Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe circa 1975
A signed and inscribed portrait of Ruscha the artist gifted to the Casado family
On the evening of the 1983 party at Ruscha’s studio, more revelers showed up than expected, and Casado ran back and forth from the restaurant with extra trays of food and pitchers of margaritas. “We didn’t charge him; he was family,” she says. At the end of the night, Ruscha gave her two stunning drawings as a thank-you gift. The pair of works, Hollywood Sunset and Blue Hollywood, were versions of an iconic Ruscha subject: the Hollywood sign he could see from his studio window.
Like his artistic hero Monet, Ruscha liked to make multiple versions of the same view, although, as he has said, “I don’t have any Seine River like Monet. I looked outside my window here and I saw the sign ‘Hollywood,’ and it became the subject matter for me.” Ruscha made different versions of the sign, with various colors and lighting, in a range of mediums. Many of his Hollywood signs are in major museum collections today, including the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
In Blue Hollywood and Hollywood Sunset – both featured in Ruscha’s 2018 catalogue raisonné and now available in Heritage’s November 19 Modern & Contemporary Art Signature® Auction – the landmark sign is clearly visible yet diminished, a small outcropping of the hillside visible against, respectively, a seascape-blue sky and a vivid sunset worthy of a movie poster. Their extreme horizonal format, like a wide-screen, CinemaScope movie, references both the topography and the typography of Los Angeles.
Ed Ruscha (b. 1937), ‘Hollywood Sunset,’ 1983. Dry pigment on paper. 10-1/2 x 31-1/2 inches (26.7 x 80.0 cm). Available in Heritage’s November 19 Modern & Contemporary Art Signature® Auction.
As a young man, Ruscha had left the more-or-less real West (he grew up in Oklahoma) to migrate, as he said, to the place where the mythic West was invented. His Hollywood sign paintings are in the tradition of that California history of mythmaking; the actual Hollywood sign, a flat construction of wood and paint propped up against a hillside, is never seen as Ruscha depicts it. The sign sits mid-slope, not silhouetted at the top of the hill, and because it faces south, it is never actually lit from behind. Ruscha transfigured the banal reality to the sublime, fusing irony and nostalgia together into the fabled “Hollywood” of our collective perception – the generator of our myths and dreams that is itself a mythical dream.
Heritage offers these elegant works in their original, simple frames from the time of Ruscha’s gift to Patricia Casado. They have never been offered on the market before. Indeed, when Ruscha borrowed the works for inclusion in his catalogue raisonné, he was delighted to see them after so long, as the period was under-represented in his own holdings.
People come from everywhere just to see that sign. It’s mythic. It’s part of who we are. So for Ed to give me those skies, that sign, in those colors – it was like he gave me the city itself.”
–Patricia Casado
For her part, Casado is reopening Lucy’s El Adobe, which had fallen into ruin after closing during Covid. A sequel to the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, starring Brad Pitt, is being filmed there, restoring the restaurant’s façade to its original condition, and opening is planned for late 2025. As artifacts of the relationship between artist and restaurateur, Blue Hollywood and Hollywood Sunset are emblems of the restaurant’s role in LA’s creative and political ecosystem, and their sale directly funds the restaurant’s next chapter.
The works remind Casado of the daily visitors to the Griffith Observatory, where they crowd the terraces waiting for the sun to set. “When it drops, they applaud,” she says. “They literally applaud the sun. And I think, those colors, those skies, that’s what he captured. That’s why I love those drawings.”
