Allan D'Arcangelo created this work in 1964 as a benefit print for the eponymous Paris Review magazine which invited some of the most famous artists of the era to contribute. Over the next decade, D'Arcangelo would continue to receive significant recognition in the art world - exhibiting at Fischbach and then Marlborough Galleries in Manhattan. He was well known for his paintings of the iconic American highway, along with his depictions of desolate, industrial landscapes. In her essay "Ghost on the Highway: Allan D'arcangelo's Haunting Americana", Alice Bucknell writes, "A born-and-bred New Yorker, D’Arcangelo spent his due time trawling through the Bible Belt of the Deep South and the dizzying expanse of the Southwest desert as well as the more expected outposts of New York and L.A. Taking a particular favor to the way acrylic interacts with light — how it avoids the glistening sheen of oil, and how the flatness of the medium masks the presence of the artist’s hand — D’Arcangelo teases out complex ideas of the highway’s reality and representation, its rampant commercialization and maddening isolation, as well as escapism and entrapment as two split personalities of American infrastructure space through his signature flattening one-point perspective. “My most profound experiences of landscape were looking through the windshield,” D’Arcangelo explained to Marco Livingstone in the spring of 1988 while the two drove from New York City to the artist’s studio in upstate New York: an idiosyncratic interview included in the exhibition catalogue. “The sky, the tree line and the pavement all have the same quality, and it has to do with our separation from the natural world.” Far from the sugar highs of Pop and the exit strategy fantasies of the freeway celebrated by Kerouac’s crew, D’Arcangelo’s work breaks down its iconography, re-assembling these symbols and signs into a world that is legible but impossible to navigate..."