A effervescent exemplar of Ed Ruscha’s painterly virtuoso, Limited Palette embodies the irreverent self-referentiality and playful cheekiness which has made the West-Coast painter one of the most recognizable icons in American art. Depicting a painter’s palette in a veiled chiaroscuro style, the form emerging out from the background, Ruscha here explores the further possibilities which a limited field of color can bring to his pop iconography while ironically alluding to his previous creative pursuits with a limited chromatic palette.

Ruscha drained color out of his paintings in the late 1980s, deploying black and white with magisterial effects. The Ruscha scholar Briony Fer describes the poignant effect had on Ruscha’s works, writing how “one of the reasons he has deployed black and white so effectively is because it offers him the most schematic means of registering light and dark in painting and, of all the much-vaunted deadpan tone of his work, dramatizes the almost extravagant projections as well as the everyday visual habits at stake in the mechanics of viewing itself” (B. Fer, “Moth-Man: Ruscha’s Light and Dark,” in Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Four: 1988-1992, New York, 2009, p. 5).

In Limited Palette, Ruscha plays not only with the effects of black and white, but with his prior explorations of the subject as well, nodding in his title as well as in his addition of two splashes of primary color in a meta-reference to his previously limited palette. The blobs of red and yellow bleed out across the darkened form of the palette, providing a contrasting vibrancy to the work’s overall muted tones. His depiction of the palette as a hazy object suspended within the canvas’s void harkens back to his upbringing in Los Angeles and his previous engagement with photography and the theme Hollywood—its grainy appearance approximates the effects of grainy film or an unfocused lens. Rather than the pristine clarity of his early photographic work, such as his Every Building on Sunset Strip from 1966, he favors the more blurred beauty explored in the works of artists including Alfred Stieglitz and Florence Henri.

Ruscha had previously drawn palettes in two works on paper from the previous year, Palette for Artists Who Use White and Black & White Palette, in these cases depicting in a dramatic chiaroscuro an entirely black and white palette. Fascinatingly, Ruscha had depicted the palette shape decades before in two works from his famous series of black-and-white gunpowder drawings, Grapes from 1967 and Pool from 1968, the latter now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Close looking at each work reveals that the typographical counters in the respective ‘G’ and ‘P’ form a palette shape. Reflecting that such a motif would reappear twenty years later in a painting perfectly encapsulates the artist’s proclamation that “all my images have a connecting link in a continuity” (E. Ruscha, quoted in Mel Bochner, “Ed Un-Edited: Excerpts from Forty-Three Years of Ed Ruscha’s Published Statements and Interviews,” in op. cit., p. 16).