Summary of Richard Prince
One of the most infamous appropriation artists, Richard Prince has employed a number of strategies to question the authorship and ownership of artistic imagery. By rephotographing, copying, scanning, and manipulating the work of others, he has crafted a technique of appropriation and provocation. Drawing his subjects from subcultures and cultural cliches, Prince also demonstrates how easily we accept marketing messages and stereotypes, and how dependent these icons are on the context in which they are presented. Stripped from their original environment, Prince makes the familiar seem strange, and invites the viewer to scrutinize that which is usually consumed in a quick glance.
Accomplishments
- By reproducing the cliches of advertising and mass media in the gallery space, Prince forces the viewer to confront how these messages are fiction. Prince specifically chooses iconic cultural symbols, such as the lone cowboy or the sexy nurse, which he both celebrates and exposes as false constructions.
- Prince's appropriation techniques have invited multiple lawsuits, with mixed results. His process of borrowing, sampling, or copying the work of others has forced a legal and artistic reconsideration of the rights of reproduction and the ownership of images.
- Akin to Marcel Duchamp's readymade sculptures, which were "chosen" mass-produced objects made art by their context, Prince's appropriation of work by other artists has prompted new thinking about the limits of ownership. While his tactics are sometimes questionably legal, Prince has "chosen" artworks to reproduce, and has been able to circulate them despite the protests of the original artist or owner.
- Prince's similar working methods of appropriation and mass-media sources soon brought him into the circle known as the "Pictures Generation." Alongside artists like Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine, who also explored the ways that generic images connoted meaning, Prince deconstructed the codes of advertising and commercial photography, revealing their repetitions and cliches.
Important Art by Richard Prince
Spiritual America
Prince's most infamous appropriation presents us with a highly disturbing image and questions of authorship, ownership, and consent. Originally taken by a commercial photographer, Gary Gross, in 1976, this photograph of a young Brooke Shields is unsettlingly near to child pornography. Shields, age 10, stands at the center of the frame, her arms outstretched to expose her nude figure. Her gaze meets that of the viewer with a look that is disconcertingly alluring. Light from the window bounces off her glistening skin and the white smoke that rises up to her knees. This mature expression and seductive stance are in direct conflict with her undeveloped body and obvious youth. It is doubtlessly a provocative and highly sexualized image of a prepubescent girl.
While the image is visually troubling, the story of its origin is also unsavory. The original photograph had been taken with the consent of Shields's mother, who sold Gross the unlimited publication rights for $450. At the time, in 1976, Shields was relatively unknown. In 1983, the year of Prince's rephotograph, Shields and her mother had sued Gross in an attempt to suppress the image, but were unsuccessful. In the press surrounding this court battle, the photograph was never reproduced by the mainstream media, but Prince found it in an adult publication (Little Women), rephotographed it, and presented it in a gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Visitors to the show were only admitted by invitation, transforming the exhibition into an elite event; yet, as this was the only image on display, viewers had to acknowledge that they had come specifically to see this controversial work, making them complicit in the exploitation of the young Shields. Prince therefore exposed not only the salacious work, the dubious conditions of its origin and the consent of the subject, but also the public's fascination with scandal. The title of Prince's rephotograph and of the exhibition, Spiritual America, was taken from a pre-existing source, an Alfred Stieglitz photograph of a gelded horse, often interpreted as a critique of American prudishness or repression.
The recontextualization of this disturbing photograph reveals a distinction between fine art and commercial photography: in its original context, meant for distribution in adult publications, the work borders on child pornography; presented as an artwork, Prince joins a tradition of representing the female (including the prepubescent) nude. Rather than clarifying the distinction between high and low art, however, Prince's rephotograph lingers in the gray area between them; he has created a work that speaks the language of both the highest and lowest registers of culture, without resting completely in either one. The framing of Shields's highly aestheticized body between two figurative sculptures recalls a tradition of figurative painting. In the gallery context, viewers are expected to dispassionately appreciate her beauty, and yet, this new context does not entirely erase the traces of the image's origins, something uncomfortably tawdry remains. Even the lofty title, Spiritual America, does not transform the photograph into high art, but helps to position Prince's work as a critique of American culture, exploitation and ambition.
Unsurprisingly, the work remains highly controversial. In 2009, it was banned from an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London at the demand of the police. The photograph was replaced by a 2005 version, Spiritual America IV, in which Brooke Shields, then 40 years old, reproduced the original pose while dressed in a bikini. This work has been applauded for returning agency to Shields, who acknowledges the original photograph while choosing, as an adult, the terms of how she wants to display her body.
Chromogenic print - Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Untitled (Cowboy)
The Marlboro Man cowboy, emblem of Marlboro cigarettes, was both a stereotypical icon of the American West and a romanticized anachronism. Taken from 1950s advertisements, these photographs depict the stoic, lone hero, riding through an expansive and untamed landscape, his horse as his only companion. Relying heavily upon the American pop cultural phenomenon of John Wayne, Prince's cowboy series echo the pervasive interest in the mythologies of the American West which permeated television, film, music, and literature.
With the Marlboro Man, Prince singled out one of the most successful marketing campaigns and highlighted how effectively these generic messages suggested deeper levels of meaning. The Marlboro Man series of advertisements, which ran for nearly 40 years, had begun as an effort to rebrand Marlboro's filtered cigarettes (previously thought of as feminine), as a manly product. The cowboy, an icon layered with symbolism, idealism, and nostalgia, was an immediate success.
In rephotographing the original ads, removing the text, enlarging them nearly to life-size and reframing them as fine art, Prince forces the viewer to consider the images from a new perspective. Isolated as fine art, the viewer doesn't dismiss the construction of the image so readily; it becomes a text that demands confrontation, analysis, or contemplation. Prince's appropriation calls into question the authenticity of the Marlboro images and their subliminal messages. Removed from a popular context, the fantastical illusion of the rowdy and rugged cowboy as an American icon begins to crumble. This is not truly a cowboy in action, but merely an actor playing a part in a fantasy of American history; even after Marlboro began casting real cowboys and rodeo workers in their ads, these photographs were carefully staged and professionally directed. Although we see the rider set against a romantic sky, galloping across an endless expanse of wild terrain, he was posed by a commercial photographer to create a fiction, to sell a product. The success of the advertising campaign relies on the professional photographer's ability to play to the imagined ideal of the cowboy; the success of Prince's appropriation comes from the simple removal the cowboy from the slogans and logos and reveal how generic the image truly is.
The image is otherwise unaltered; the composition and execution of the original photograph is the work of an anonymous commercial artist; Prince only recontextualizes it through his appropriation. By selecting it, however, and framing it in this manner, Prince critiques both the trite nature of this advertising campaign and the viewer's unquestioning acceptance of the fantasy portrayed. His intentions are amplified by his many versions of this subject. Taken as a group, the cliches of the Marlboro Man become obvious, exposing the marketing strategies at work.
Ektacolor photograph - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Man Crazy Nurse #3
Prince's interest in cliches and stereotypes inspired his Nurse series, which he began in 2003. In appropriating the covers of 1950s pulp fiction novels, he explores the eroticized subject of the sexy nurse. He worked directly from the original sources, scanning the cover of the book, printing it on a large canvas, and then embellishing it with paint. The multi-stage process results in images that are both mass-produced and hand-rendered, manipulated through digital and analogue tools. While the subject is thoroughly popular, the painterliness reveals Prince's study of Abstract Expressionism; scholars have noted the blocky color fields of the background recall Mark Rothko, the dangerous woman and gestural marks suggest de Kooning.
In each image, Prince preserves the figure of the nurse, her face obscured by a surgeon's mask, and the title of the book, although he often manipulates the details, swaps titles, and changes the features of the women through his drippy application of paint. The repetitious nature of the paintings in this series captures the standard format of Prince's source material: a type of lowbrow popular novel, an escapist subgenre of inexpensive fiction. As literature, they were entirely forgettable, however, they were successful in promoting a popular cliche. Like his earlier Cowboy series, Prince leads his viewers to reconsider the images that permeate American visual culture. Isolated as art objects, the images require closer examination; it becomes immediately evident that these nurses are not really nurses, but constructed icons of stereotypical fantasies. They are even presented as labeled objects: Man Crazy Nurse, Surfer Nurse, Nympho Nurse, etc. While the original viewer readily accepted them and Prince's viewer easily recognizes them, they are merely another level of fiction. Yet, in this series, Prince is not directly critical of this cultural construct. His treatment of the surface, with its alluring palette and hand-brushed strokes of paint, implies a level of pleasure or celebration. He acts as a middleman between his audience and images of America's pop culture past.
Inkjet and synthetic polymer on canvas - Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Up There
Following Prince's appropriation techniques, his joke series adopted a different strategy to highlight the functions of cliches and stereotypes. Beginning in the 1980s, he has now created paintings of over 100 different jokes, most of them appropriated from comedians' acts or the generic, authorless comedy of the mid-century borscht belt.
The format for each joke painting is the same, both structurally and formally. Each joke is isolated on a large canvas, painted in plain block letters against a solid field of color. The jokes are similarly straightforward and simple, involving a short build up, followed by a punch line. The jokes cover the typical subjects of stand-up comedy, especially religion and flawed relationships. They are throwaway lines, written for an easy laugh; but while the original jokes are disposable one-liners, presented on a large scale in bright colors, they become objects of contemplation. We expect that art contains some deeper level of meaning, so the viewer slows down to read them carefully, perhaps multiple times, in search of some larger significance. In Prince's Joke series, however, there is no profound realization to be had. This prolonged engagement with them strips the joke of its impact, transforming a humorous fiction into a pathetic-sounding truth.
The joke series also expands Prince's exploration of cultural icons and the ways in which they operate. Like his other appropriations, the joke is reliant upon its context. It would be difficult to explain why a joke is funny to an outsider, just as it is challenging to explain the cultural significance of the American cowboy. Prince describes his joke series as abstract paintings, especially in countries where English is not the dominant language, further confusing the standards of high and low culture, art and non-art material.
Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas - Skarstedt Collection, London
Untitled (de Kooning)
An exhibition catalogue of de Kooning's Women series inspired Prince to create this series of mixed media works. Interacting with reproductions from the book, Prince sketched over the figures and added cut out limbs, facial features, and genitalia from printed media before scanning and printing the images onto large canvases. Painting the final layer, Prince produces a montage of reproductions, catalogues, pornographic magazines, and new lines and colors that alter de Kooning's infamous women to create equally monstrous companions.
An admirer of the iconic Abstract Expressionist, Prince's appropriation of de Kooning's work is simultaneously tribute and sacrilege, reiteration and rebellion. Joining a long tradition of artists copying earlier masters in an attempt to learn their ways, Prince engages with de Kooning's most iconic series. Like Prince, de Kooning was a controversial and complicated artist; he was particularly famous for his highly gestural paintings of demonic women, which seemed to both embrace and challenge the basic theories of Abstract Expressionism. Prince's intervention creates an assaulting network of mass media images that both compete and harmonize with de Kooning's women, which were also created in a series of energetic additions and erasures. While paying homage to an artistic idol, Prince defaces his work.
This series represents Prince's first appropriation of the work of a recognizable artist. Unlike the stereotypical and anonymous commercial sources that usually serve as his material, Prince is here forced to deal with de Kooning's iconic and visually distinctive style. This pairing is not as unlikely as it might seem; Prince has long studied and admired de Kooning's paintings and de Kooning famously appropriated the mouth from a cigarette advertisement into one of his Woman paintings. The resulting multi-media constructions are clearly the work of de Kooning while markedly not; ultimately, Prince devises a means of collaboration where the results are no longer the sole property of either artist. In the tradition of art training, artists have long copied the work of previous masters, but Prince is no mere copyist. He riffs on de Kooning's subject and style, creating a hyperbolic extension of mid-20th century Expressionism. Yet while he celebrates de Kooning, he also demonstrates the ease of copying another artist's style and thus diminishes the notion of artistic originality or genius; the hand here reflects de Kooning as much as himself. His work would not be possible without de Kooning, yet while he extensively alters the original work, he cannot erase the original source; he may cover over de Kooning's work, but he cannot obliterate his ancestor. This series represents another strategy where Prince creates his artistic brand from commandeering and manipulating the work of others.
Inkjet and acrylic on canvas - Gagosian Gallery
Untitled (Portrait)
Each of the 38 images of his "new portraits" is a simple screen capture from the Instagram profile of others. His sources include celebrities, artists, bloggers, but also ordinary people. Before capturing the image, Prince commented on it, creating the appearance of a relationship between himself and the original author, and giving himself the final word in their exchange. The comments, however, are riddled with slang, often nonsensical or invented by Prince himself. They have a charged quality, often suggesting varying levels of intimacy between himself and the subject, such as in this example where he commented "T-Shirt bathing suit! Nice. Let's hook up next week. Lunch, Smiles. R" beneath a photo of the famously voluptuous Pamela Anderson in a wet T-shirt on the beach.
The New Portraits exhibition has resurrected debates on appropriation and authorship. To many, Prince's reproduction of these Instagram photos, altered only by his commentary, does not sufficiently transform them from their original state to create a new work of art. They are uncomfortable works of fine art, particularly as the low quality of the images creates grainy, pixelated, prints when reproduced on a large scale. Adding further insult, Prince is commanding significant prices for content readily available online and created by others. Several photographers represented in this show have pursued legal action against Prince; one creator began selling her own versions of Prince's work for 1/10 his price (a tactic that Prince applauded).
Once more, Prince's accomplishment is far more successful on theoretical level than in aesthetic or artistic ways. Appropriating a new, digital, medium, Prince updates his artistic project for the digital age. Technically, the images remain the property of the people who posted them to Instagram's platform, but Prince demonstrates the weak claim the owners have and the way they cede their private ownership when posting content online. Techniques of sampling, hyperlinking, retweeting, and the like have added new complications to the concepts of uniqueness or authorship; it has become practically impossible for an artist to completely control the circulation of his or her images. Prince unapologetically skirts the increasingly elusive line between fair use and theft.
Prince also revisits the ideas of voyeurish and exploitation in his series, recalling his earlier rephotograph, Spiritual America. Many of the images selected by Prince from Instagram are sexy or appealing, an erotic charge often amplified by his commentary. His words have struck some critics as leering or cat-calling, and others have been disturbed by the monumental, public circulation of images meant to have been available on a smaller scale. Reprinting these screenshots with Prince's comments brings the viewer into a conversation, but one uncomfortably controlled by Prince, who carefully makes sure to have the last word in each exchange.
Inkjet on Canvas - Gagosian Gallery
Biography of Richard Prince
Childhood and Education
Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone, where his parents were stationed with the United States government. In an interview with the English author, J.G. Ballard, eighteen-year old Prince maintained that his parents worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner of the modern CIA; given Prince's love of hoaxes, however, and Ballard's later career as a renowned science fiction novelist, this claim is dubious at best. The family later relocated to Braintree, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. Growing up in the 1960s, he embraced the era's distinct counter-cultures, even attending Woodstock. Prince admits to exhibiting obsessive tendencies in his adolescence, such as rearranging his room multiple times and vacuuming his carpet into patterns.
After graduating high school in 1967, Prince made a short trip to Europe, returning to the United States to attend Nasson College, a private liberal arts college in Maine. In 1973 he fulfilled his dream of moving to New York City, where he juggled several odd jobs; most notable was his stint at Time Inc. where he worked in the tear sheet department. Responsible for distributing articles within the company, he would clip them from magazines, leaving behind images and advertisements. Through this process, he discovered his first source of inspiration: the repeated cliches and patterns of advertising. In a process that the artist compares to beachcombing, Prince dug through pages and pages of unwanted magazine ads and began to experiment with them.
Early Period
Without any traditional artistic training, Prince's emergence into the art world was more notable for his exploration of contemporary art theory, than for his technical proficiency. He began by collaging and re-photographing images from marketing campaigns and mass media sources. These techniques of appropriation were part of a larger movement, often referred to as the Pictures Generation, of questioning authorship, originality, and tradition. He mined stereotypes of American culture and various subcultures, selecting their most recognizable attributes and isolating them from any supporting context. His Cowboy series, re-photographed images of the iconic Marlboro Man without any advertising text, was an early success. He used similar strategies of appropriation for his Girlfriends series, which used images of biker girls from motorcycle and car magazines, and his Nurse paintings, drawn from the covers of pulp fiction novels.
While Prince began as a photographer, he has explored different media, including painting, digital manipulation and even three-dimensional work. He uses readymade materials, such as his Hood sculptures, which are made from mail-ordered car hoods, painted to reflect the American fetishization of the car.
Prince's fame grew quickly: within 12 years of his first solo show in the city, Prince was given an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art and his work began breaking records at auction. Prints of his Cowboy (2000) and Spiritual America (1981) rank among the 10 most expensive photographs ever sold at auction.
Current Work
In recent years, Prince's use of appropriation has been problematic, resulting in multiple lawsuits. Shortly after Prince joined the Gagosian galleries in 2008, his "Canal Zone" series sparked a costly lawsuit when the French photographer, Patrick Cariou, sued Prince for the unlawful use of his original photographs. A number of Prince's paintings in this series were based on photographs taken by Cariou. The case has remained influential, weighing artistic freedom and fair use guidelines against copyright protections. The rulings were mixed, initially supporting Cariou's claim and then supporting Prince upon appeal. The case was settled in 2014, allowing that 25 of 30 paintings from he "Canal Zone" series did not violate Cariou's copyright, with an out of court agreement compensating the artist for the additional five images. Prince's most recent series, New Portraits (2014), based on Instagram photos, has also resulted in legal action by the original photographers, a matter that remains unresolved at the time of this writing.
A bibliophile, Prince collects rare editions of books. He specializes in texts by the Beat Generation, a group of writers in the 1950s known for their antiestablishment stance and emphasis on spiritual, but not necessarily religious, themes. Prince owns a copy of On the Road inscribed to Jack Kerouac's mother as well as the copy formerly owned by Neal Cassady, Kerouac's close friend and inspiration for a central character. In 2011, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France held an exhibition, "Richard Prince: American Prayer," of Prince's books paired with his artwork. The artist also funded a library in his local town to house his collection.
The Legacy of Richard Prince
Continuing a practice that began in the era of Andy Warhol and Pop art, Prince's practice of blurring the boundaries between fine art and advertisement, along with his frequent and unapologetic use of appropriation has altered the ways in which artists understand their ownership of images. His use of visual cliches reinforced Cindy Sherman's exploration of visual stereotypes and his method of rephotographing influenced Sherrie Levine's reproductions of modernist art. His brazen and unapologetic manner was an important model for the Young British Artists (YBAs), especially the work of Damien Hirst. Nearly forty years after first stirring controversy, Prince continues to be one of the most provocative artists working today.
Influences and Connections
![Barbara Gladstone]()
Barbara Gladstone![Larry Gagosian]()
Larry Gagosian![Douglas Crimp]()
Douglas Crimp
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Appropriation Art![Beat Generation]()
Beat Generation
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Jack Goldstein ![Kelley Walker]()
Kelley Walker
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Damien Hirst ![Jerry Saltz]()
Jerry Saltz
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Young British Artists ![Appropriation Art]()
Appropriation Art
Useful Resources on Richard Prince
- Richard Prince: American PrayerOur PickBy Robert Rubin, Marie Minssieux-Chamonard, & John McWhinnie
- Richard Prince: White PaintingsBy Richard Prince
- Richard Prince: It's a Free ConcertBy Richard Prince, Paul Black, & Kerstin Stakemeier
- Richard Prince: Canaries in the Coal MineBy Richard & Gunnar Kvaran
