Photo By Gail

The phrase immortalized on this canvases, Wen Out For Cigrets (1985), refers to an American cultural trope in which a father leaves the house to buy cigarettes and never returns, abandoning his family.

The implicit sense of tension and mystery is heightened by the nighttime scene behind the text, which pictures an anonymous urban expanse illuminated by a grid of lights.

This background, which artist Ed Ruscha repeated in a series of paintings made around the same time, features the kind of oblique aerial view that he has gravitated toward in his work since the mid-1960s.

Photographed as part of the Exhibit Ed Ruscha: Now Then at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.