Edward Ruscha
Actual Size1962

On view:

Broad Contemporary Art Museum, floor 3

Large-scale painting divided into midnight-blue upper half with oversized yellow 'SPAM' lettering and white lower half scattered with dark marks and a small Spam can label with yellow hand shape

Mixed-media work on white ground scattered with small blue dashes; a bright yellow painted brushstroke trails leftward from a small Spam can label, with the handwritten words "ACTUAL SIZE" written in pencil over the yellow paint.

Artist or Maker: Edward Ruscha
United States, Nebraska, Omaha, active California, Los Angeles, born 1937
Title: Actual Size
Place Made: United States
Date Made: 1962
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 67 1/16 × 72 1/16 in. (170.34 × 183.04 cm)
Credit Line: Anonymous gift through the Contemporary Art Council
Accession Number: M.63.14
Classification: Paintings
Collecting Area: Modern Art
Curatorial Notes: Words and phrases are central to Ed Ruscha’s work. While early twentieth-century artists have used text as collage or to challenge the relationship of language and images, Ruscha plays with puns, alliteration, and words that suggest sounds, all painted with careful attention to color, size, and font. In Actual Size, he includes a to-scale image of a flying can of Spam, elevating this budget-friendly lunchmeat to iconic status, similar to Warhol’s depiction of popular soup, cereal, and cleaning products. This painting was included in the 1962 exhibition New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum, regarded as the first museum exhibition of Pop art in the United States.

Wall label, 2021.
Selected Bibliography: Environment, Participation, Cultural Structures: General Catalogue. Vol. 1. Venezia: Alfieri Edizioni d'Arte, 1976.
Eliel, Carol, editor. Light, Space, Surface: Art from Southern California. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: DelMonico Books, 2021.
Ed Ruscha : OKLA. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, 2021.
Cherix, Christophe, Ana Torok, and Kiko Aebi. Ed Ruscha - Now Then: A Retrospective. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2023.

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