Richard Prince

For an article on the British actor who murdered William Terriss, see Richard Archer Prince.

Richard Prince
Richard Prince
Nationality	American
Known for	Painting, Photography

Richard Prince, (born 1949 in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone, now part of Republic of Panama) is an American painter and photographer. His works have often been the subject of debates within the art world. Trained as a figure painter, Prince began creating collages containing photographs in 1975. His image, ‘Untitled (Cowboy), a rephotograph constructed from cigarette advertisements, was the first ‘photograph’ to raise more than $1 million at auction when it was sold at Christie's New York in 2005, despite violating numerous copyright laws.

Starting in 1977, Prince created controversy by re-photographing four photographs which previously appeared in the New York Times. Within the art world, this became part of a major discussion concerning authorship and authenticity of photographic images, as well as photographic copyright issues. This continued into 1983, when his work Spiritual America featured Garry Gross's photo of Brooke Shields at the age of 10, standing in a bathtub, as an allusion to precocious sexuality and to the Alfred Stieglitz photograph by the same name. The display of this image led to lawsuits by Shields' mother and the original photographer, and led to further discussion within the art community, concerning the role of voyeurism within photography. His Jokes series (beginning 1986) concerns the sexual fantasies and sexual frustrations of middle-class America, using stand-up comedy and burlesque humour.

After living in New York City for 25 years, Prince moved to upstate New York. His minimuseum, Second House, was owned by the Guggenheim Museum, but was hit by lightning and burned down after being up for only six years from 2001 to 2007.

Early life

Richard Prince was born on August 6, 1949 in the American occupied Panama Canal Zone. The occupation of his parents is unknown. During an interview in 2000 with Julie L. Belcove, he responded to the question of why his parents were in the Zone, by saying “they worked for the government.” When asked further if his father was involved in the military, Prince responded, “No, he just worked for the government.” He combined this response with a mischievous smile so as to allude to the possibility of a CIA background. Prince later lived in the New England city of Braintree, Massachusetts a suburb of Boston.

He was first interested in art created by the American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. “I was very attracted to the idea of someone who was by themselves, fairly antisocial, kind of a loner, someone who was noncollaborative” (Richard Prince, June 1, 2000, Fairchild Publications). Prince was growing up during the height of Pollock’s career, thus making his work very accessible. The 1956 publication of Time Magazine’s article that dubbed Pollock “Jack the Dripper” made the thought of pursuing art as career all the more possible. After finishing high school in 1967, Prince set off for Europe at age 18. He traveled the continent via train, making a point to track down the museums that housed famous artworks he had seen in textbooks.

He returned home and attended Nasson College in Maine. He describes his school as being one without grades or real structure. From Maine he was drawn to New York City. Prince has said that the attraction for NYC was instigated by the famous photograph of Franz Kline gazing out the window of his 14th Street studio. Prince described the picture as displaying “a man content to be alone, pursuing the outside world from the sanctum of his studio” (Nancy Spector, Richard Prince). We see here the significant influence Pollock’s idea of being comfortable with solitude had on Prince. It pushed him to look for a new kind of life in NYC.

Prince arrived in the city in 1977 and began to slowly immerse himself into the downtown art scene. He had entered the big city in a time of an “anything goes” attitude. From the East Village to the Lower Eastside to SoHo, emerging artists, writers, musicians, and dancers found refuge in a Club scene infused environment that promoted the growth of collaboration, in the ways of artistic demonstration as well as creativity. Prince found himself in a city that had been dominated by the works of the Lichtenstein, Warhol, Rauschenberg and the other greats of the 60’s, but also a city that was open to the orchestration of the new. He struggled in his early days in the city and one could observe that he has struggled for the majority of his career, until recently.

Prince’s first solo exhibition took place in June 1980 during a residency at the CEPA gallery in Buffalo, NY. The pamphlet Menthol Pictures was published as part of that residency .

In the fall of 2007, Prince was honored with a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a show that encompassed every facet of his career, displaying it in chorological order, along the upward spiraling walls. This show has continued onto the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and will eventually come to its end in the summer of 2008 at the London Serpentine Gallery. Maria Morris Hamburg, the curator of photography at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has said, “He is absolutely essential to what’s going on today, he figured out before anyone else—and in a very precocious manner—how thoroughly pervasive the media is. It’s not just an aspect of our lives, but the dominant aspect of our lives.”

Prince has built up one of the greatest private collection of Beat books and papers in existence. Prince has several copies of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, including one inscribed to Kerouac’s mother, one famously read on The Steve Allen Show, the original proof copy of the book and an original galley, as well as the copy owned by Neal Cassady — aka Dean Moriarty, which has Cassady’s signature and marginal notes within.

Career

Over the last 59 years, Richard Prince’s career has played out much like how he once described his work methodology. In a 2005 New York Magazine interview he said, “It’s about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things.” Prince has been about experimenting and working with the results. He has said that a governing factor of his work is the spontaneity of it. At the end of the day, what he is creating is just paint on canvas. If his work stood next to a de Kooning or a Picasso, there would be no difference in the medium. It is the subject that is radical.

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Paintings

Joke Paintings

Prince has continued with his appropriation through his entire career. However, next rather than extract inspiration from the photography of others, he moved into the realm of text, with great attention given to jokes. In the mid-80’s, Prince began to search out comedic lines that had been used so often by different comedians and films that he considered them to be overplayed, overused. These jokes had been used by such an array of individuals, that their originators were no longer attached to them at all, nor were they recognizable as any one person’s joke. Prince again uses his joke works to explore the extent of ownership and its significance in life and more so in art. He is testing the limits of right to possession by helping these jokes to continue further on their journey, away from their authors. He is widening the gap between the creator and the user.

Prince’s first joke piece came about in 1985, in New York, when he was living in the back room of the 303 Gallery, located on Park Avenue South. His first “Joke” was about psychiatrists, a subject he later worked with often. Prince described the discovery of the idea for the Jokes beginning when he posted up a small 11 x 14 inch handwritten joke on paper. He realized that if he had walked into a gallery and had seen it hanging from the wall, he would have been envious. Prince’s Jokes come in several forms. His first Jokes were hand written, taken from joke books. His jokes grew into more substantial works as he began to incorporate them with images, often pairing jokes with images that had no relevance with one another, creating an obscure relationship. An example of one of these peculiar combinations can be seen in his 1991 Good Revolution, a piece that depicted black and white images of a male torso in boxing shorts set amongst doodles of a kitchen stove. These were set above the text “Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman that will give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you’re in the wrong home, that’s what it means.” In the late 80’s/early 90’s Prince, like his contemporaries Lorna Simpson and Barbara Kruger, was one of the first to play with image and text, a style that was becoming increasingly popular. Prince would often put jokes amongst cartoons, often from the New Yorker, that’d he’d copy by hand. Prince described his early discovery of jokes and his sense of humor, as “I never really started telling, I started telling them over. Back in 1985, in Venice, California, I was drawing my favorite cartoons in pencil on paper. After this I dropped the illustration or image part of the cartoon and concentrated on the punch line” (Modern Painter’s Special American Issue, Autumn 2002”) Prince’s jokes were primarily “one-liners”. They were very satirical, poking fun at topics such as religion, the relationship between husband and wife, his relations with women, and so on. The jokes are all quite simple and straight to the point, often relying on a punch line; “I took my wife to a wife-swapping party, I had to throw in some cash” or “I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my names”. Prince commonly repeats his jokes over and over in one piece, immediately after the first finishes, the same one starts up again. This repetition works to fuel the continual break down of the joke’s originality and significance. He is aiding in the destruction of these, sometimes tasteless, textual parodies.

Prince has stated that he does not censor his choice of jokes. There are no limitations, although he has made it clear that the only boundary that he will never cross is “Why did the Nazi cross the road?” Jokes became the complete subject of his prints, set atop monochromatic backgrounds red, orange, blue, yellow, etc. These works range in size from 56 x 48 inches as seen in his 1994 Untitled, to 112 x 203.5 inches, as seen in his 2000 work Nuts. His early jokes were modestly sized, but as they caught on he began executing larger pieces. These Monochromatic Jokes question the importance of the unique, in high art. What is it that set these jokes apart from one another, the background color, the color of the text, the jokes themselves? If you look at any of the artists working around the same time period as Prince, even the other appropriation artists, we see a distinct quality between works and series. Works are distinguishable from one another or identifiable as a particular artist, but with Prince’s Monochromatic Jokes, we are presented with yellow text upon a blue background a seen in his 1989 Are You Kidding? If you were to look at the works of Jeff Koons, another appropriation artist, and what he was creating in the late 80’s in the same environment and time period as Prince, there’d be a striking difference. Not only between the technique and style, but also the significance given to making the artwork identifiable. An example of this can be seen if we look at what each artist created in the same year. For example, in 1988 Koons was working with porcelain sculptures like his Michael Jackson and Bubbles and Pink Panther. These are two works produced in this year that are both identifiable from one another. In the same year, 1988, we can look at Prince’s Fireman and the Drunk and his Untitled (Joke). What sets these two works apart? The subject of the jokes, the burnt orange background in the one and the lime green in the other?

Prince used his Jokes to disturb the balance that had governed the art world, as well as incorporate painting into his career. Jokes provided Prince with the means to demonstrate his talent with paint. This is seen in the increasingly diverse backgrounds of his jokes. In a 2000 interview with Julie L. Belcove, Prince called the joke paintings “what I wanted to become known for.” When asked of the artistic genre of his jokes Prince once responded “The Joke paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can’t speak English.” (Artforum International Magazine, March 1, 2003). Since Prince’s emergence as an appropriation artist, he has taken the technique into the realm of a multitude of mediums. We look at the recently discussed series as his most significant because they set the groundwork for a career of appropriation. Yet following the rephotopraphs, Gangs, and the Jokes, we see more. Prince continues to keep up his theme of the trialing of authorship and the questioning of reality and its presence in the materialist infused media culture. Other notable series have been his Celebrities, Car Hoods, Check Paintings, and Nurse Paintings.

Celebrities

Celebrities is a series that plays with the American obsession with movie stars. As seen in his earlier works, Prince continues his obsession with collecting in this late 90’s series. Prince would search out headshots of actors and actresses and then proceed to sign them to himself, using the featured actor’s signature. He is working with the American dream in these works, the possibility that anyone can find fame, as well as the idea that our culture is so obsessed with the famous, that they would desire an image of a celebrity signed to them. Again subtly altering the works of another and forever making them him own.

Car Hoods

Car Hoods are a series that works off of the early Gangs series. It featured images from car enthusiast magazines, as well as Prince’s own interest with automobiles. Prince ordered car hoods of all different models of classic vehicles sold by stores that advertised in the magazines he photographed. He would than take the hoods and cast molds, which he would then wash in different colors. He created something very Rothko-esc with these hoods. There is something about the simplicity of color that interacts separately, yet together with one another. It brings back a memento mori of the color field artist. The peculiar host of the paint, the mold of a car hood, rather than the traditional canvas, pushes the viewer to look beyond the actuality of the piece and see life within the paint, the “poetry behind the process”.

The Check Paintings

The Check Paintings series is like the Celebrities. It was made possible by Prince’s addiction with collecting. Prince began to seek out canceled checks from famous figures in history ranging from Jack Kerouac to Andy Warhol. He would put these checks onto paint-covered canvases and often paired them with images of the individual they once belonged to. It again plays with the idea of America’s interest in the famous and the fact that these “celebrities” are real people, no different from you or I. They aren’t untouchable or elites, they too get their checks cashed and cancelled.

The Nurse Paintings

The Nurse Paintings are Prince’s most recent series. These nurses are inspired by the covers and titles of inexpensive novels that were commonly sold at newspaper stands and delis (pulp romance novels). They were cheap and trashy entertainment, hence Prince’s attraction to their reflection of what the American people want. Prince scanned the covers of the nurse books with his computer and then using the modern invention of inkjet printing, transferred the images to canvas. He then personalized the pieces with acyclic paint, adding an air of mystique to them. They first debuted in 2003 at Barbara Gladstone Galleries, who along with Larry Gagosian, represents Prince. They received mixed responses at their premier, not even able to sell for the asking price of 50-60 thousand. Presently a work from the Nurse series, which he stopped at 42 nurses, sells for a minimum of 5-6 million. Each nurse is distinguished by a personalized name such as Surfer Nurse, Naughty Nurse, Millionaire Nurse, and Dude Ranch Nurse. These are all like the images appropriated from the books they were sourced from. At an auction in New York, two different Nurses went up for sale and surpassed their high estimates. It is like Prince said “The problem with art is, it’s not like the game of golf, where you put the ball in the hole or you don’t put the ball in the hole. There’s no umpire. There’s no judge. There are no rules. It’s one of the problems, but it’s also one of the great things about art: It becomes a question of what lasts.”. Sonic Youth's Sonic Nurse album used nurse paintings for their album, and even named a song "Dude Ranch Nurse" after Prince's work.

Technique

Actual covers of books were scanned to create the foundation for the paintings — the titles and the images of the nurses. They are ink jet print on canvas with acrylic overlay and are fairly large in scale.

Richard Prince used the technique of modern rephotography and this series is notable for the technique of layering digital and analogue media: the application of an analogue medium (acrylic) to a digitalized print (ink jet) of a digitalized image (scan) of an analogue print (book cover) of an analogue artwork (original art portrayed on the book cover).

Subjects

In the series of paintings, the nurses all wear caps and their mouths are covered by surgical masks, although in some of the paintings the red lips bleed through the masks. The final presentations preserve the title and nurse image from each of the book covers, though all else is obscured.

Titles

(all works 2002 - 2003)

• A Nurse Involved, 72 x 45 inches
• Aloha Nurse, 58 x 36 inches
• BachelorNurse 40 x 28 inches
• Country Nurse 80 x 52 inches
• Danger Nurse at Work, 93 x 56 inches
• Debutant Nurse, 100 x 58 inches
• Doctor's Nurse, 58 x 36 inches
• Dr. Barry's Nurse 78 x 58
• Dude Ranch Nurse, 78 x 58 inches
• Dude Ranch Nurse, 80 x 52 inches
• Graduate Nurse, 89 x 52 inches
• Heartbreak Nurse, 54 x 64 inches
• Lake Resort Nurse
• New England Nurse
• Nurse Barclay's Dilemma, 70 x 48 inches
• Piney Woods Nurse
• Surfing Nurse #2, 78 1/4 x 91 inches
• Surgical Nurse, 58 x 36 inches

Current Works

Prince's most recent series of paintings appear at first glance to be a throwback to more traditional genres of figurative art, and a departure from the pulpy and kitchy content of the Nurse and Jokes series respectively. In these newest works, all from the beginning of 2007, Prince utilizes semi-pornographic collaged inkjet prints overlayed with acrylic paint in the style of DeKooning. Notably, it is the faces and extremities- hands and feet- which get the most direct treatment from the artist, bulging and distorting with an elegantly contained expressive energy. These works lack the obvious linguistic recontextualizing of the Jokes series, opting instead for a purely visual idiom. This overlaying of paint onto photo would seem to suggest the implicit failure of either medium to truly represent the subject, instead referencing the act of the artist as curator of discreet visual inputs. In this sense then, Prince holds fast to the methodology of appropriation, whilst simultaneously opening up the visual surface for more directly expressive treatments, thereby enriching the meaning of both.

In 2007, Prince collaborated with the fashion designer Marc Jacobs on his Spring 2008 collection for the prestigious French label Louis Vuitton. The collection itself was inspired, in part, by Prince's Nurse Paintings. In an interview for style.com Jacobs stated that after he asked Prince to collaborate with him for Louis Vuitton, Prince started to look to paperbacks that were set in iconic cities 'after dark'. Eventually, this inspired the collection, and as Marc Jacobs puts it, "(Prince) asked me, what about Louis Vuitton after dark?".

File:Richard prince car.jpg

Richard Prince exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City.

His untitled work involving the body of a 1970 Dodge Challenger and high-tech parts such as a 660 hp Hemi engine, custom interior, black wheel wells, 14-inch tires in the front and 16 inch in the back, a pale orange paint job with a flat black T/A hood, as well as various decals and emblems is being created for Frieze. He also has another car sculpture in the Guggenhiem called American Prayer. It is a 1968 Dodge Charger that has been completely emptied of any engine parts and interiors and is stripped of any paint and then powder coated. In place of the engine block there’s a cement block.

Bibliography

• Richard Prince Nurse Paintings. Distributed Art Publishers. ISBN 0-9703422-1-7
• Newman, Michael (2007). Richard Prince: Untitled (couple). The MIT Press. ISBN 978-1-84638-003-7.
• Women. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004. ISBN 3-7757-1451-0. Book of photos.
• American English. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2003. ISBN 3-88375-717-9. Photos of American and English first editions.
• 4 X 4. Korinsha Press & Co., 1997. Reprinted by Powerhouse Books, 1999. ISBN 1-57687-034-0. Book of photos, also includes interview of Prince with Larry Clark.
• Adult Comedy Action Drama. Scalo, 1995. ISBN 1-881616-36-3. Book of photos.

See also

• Cover art
• Lesbian pulp fiction
• Nurse stereotypes
• Pulp magazine
• Just Another Asshole

Images

• Untitled (girlfriend) by Richard Prince 1993
• Spiritual America by Richard Prince 1983

Quotes

• "I'm surprised at the reaction to the 'Nurse' paintings. I’ve never felt that I had to put out work that I actually liked... just because it’s out there doesn’t mean that I have to stand behind it."
• "By rephotographing a magazine page and then developing the film in a cheap lab, the photos came out very strange. They looked like they could be my photos, but they weren't."
• "I don’t see any difference now between what I collect and what I make. It’s become the same. What I’m collecting will, a lot of times, end up in my work."
• "It would be strange for me to think I’m being ripped off, because that’s what I do! In those days, it was called "pirating." Now they call it 'sampling'."
• "I think celebrity can be dangerous. The big advantage is that I no longer have to worry about whether or not I can afford to buy that extra paintbrush when I'm in the art supply store. The other advantage is that I can take time to experiment. I can fail a bit more often. I don't have to put out the work that I don't like."
• "Living in New York feels like you're always inside.. inside buildings, inside subways."
• "The subject comes first, the medium second."
• "A lot of it’s experimental, spontaneous. It’s about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things."

External links

• Richard Prince's website
• Gladstone Gallery: Richard Prince
• Sadie Coles: Richard Prince
• 1991 Richard Prince monograph from frieze
• Richard Prince interviewing the American artist Alex Katz
• Richard Prince interviewing the German artist Walter Dahn
• Richard Prince audio work "Catherine" published at Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine

The nurse paintings

• Nurse paintings on Richard Prince's website
• The Center for Nursing Advocacy comments