Richard Prince

Richard Prince, an American painter and photographer known for his controversial appropriation works, is most famous for his clever rephotographed and cropped popular advertisements.

Biography of Richard Prince

Richard Prince was born in the late 1940s in the Panama Canal Zone, which is nowadays part of the Republic of Panama. Since his early childhood, Prince moved from the Panama Canal to a suburb of Boston. He attended Nasson College in Maine.

Prince eventually relocated from Maine to New York City to work for Time Inc., a publishing company. His role at Time Inc. was to supply tear sheets of articles for magazines. During his time at the company, Prince developed a growing interest in visual arts, particularly painting, and was drawn to the work of the eminent abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock.

Over time, Prince's artistic style evolved as he adopted a technique of appropriating imagery. His rephotography aimed at appropriation itself; he used the works of others as a starting point for his own art. Prince had limited practical experience in photography and wasn't overly concerned with technical details. In interviews, he mentioned that he merely needed a subject to depict, and the choice of medium would naturally follow.

It's not surprising that Prince faced a lawsuit, given the blurred lines between appropriation and infringement. In 2008, photographer Patrick Cariou filed a lawsuit against Prince and the Gagosian Gallery for copyright infringement related to the Canal Zone exhibit. Prince appropriated 35 of Cariou's photographs with minimal alterations, and he also created 28 paintings based on images from Cariou's "Yes Rasta" book. In 2011, a US district court ruled against Prince and the Gagosian Gallery. However, in 2013, the US Court of Appeals reversed the previous decision, finding that Prince had used Cariou's photographs in a transformative manner, thus making the use fair. Five of Prince's works, which were less transformative, were sent for further review. Finally, in 2014, Cariou and Prince announced that they had settled the case. 

The artist's iconic series "Cowboys" was created from 1980 to 1992 and stands as the artist's most recognized collection of rephotographs. These pieces are based on Marlboro cigarette advertisements and the Marlboro Man, a symbol of American masculinity. "Cowboys" depicts men dressed in typical American attire, complete with boots, hats, lassos, and horses. The imagery is firmly rooted in the Western United States, celebrated for its dry, stony landscapes adorned with desert flora like cacti and tumbleweeds. Prince was impressed by the meticulously executed Marlboro advertisements, which paid extreme attention to detail.

During the same period, Prince's photo series "Gangs and Girlfriends" shared similar aesthetics with "Cowboys." He sourced images from various motorcycle magazines, with a particular fondness for the girlfriends of motorcyclists seductively posing on their partners' bikes.

In June 1980, when Prince unveiled his "Cowboys" series, he had his first solo exhibition at the CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, New York. As part of his residency at the CEPA gallery, Prince's book titled "Menthol Pictures" was published. A year later, the artist held his first West Coast solo exhibition at the Jancar/Kuhlenschmidt Gallery in Los Angeles. In 1985, he spent four months in Venice, Los Angeles, dedicating himself to several new projects.

Initially, the Prince's Nurse Paintings received mixed responses, but the 2002 piece "Overseas Nurse" became a record-breaker when it sold for $8,452,000 at Sotheby's in London. Titles of Prince's pieces in this series include "Surfer Nurse," "Naughty Nurse," "Millionaire Nurse," "Dude Ranch Nurse," and others. One of Sonic Youth's albums features a Nurse Painting on its cover, reflecting the influence of Prince's work.

Richard Prince's exhibition history is extensive and successful. Among his major shows held after 2000, a significant retrospective titled "Richard Prince: Spiritual America" was presented by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2007. The artist remains an active exhibitor, with ten solo shows in 2014 and 2015 held in various locations, including New York, France, the UK, and Japan.

Richard Prince's Art Style

Prince developed his artistic style by appropriating imagery, particularly humorous cartoons and mismatched jokes, which he then reproduced on large-scale monochrome canvases. These works later incorporated manipulated text-based elements. Prince worked in various media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, film, video, and photography. Additionally, he was a writer of poetry and fiction.

Among his most renowned artworks are the Nurse Paintings, inspired by pulp romance novels. Prince had the brilliant idea to scan these novel covers and use inkjet printing to transfer the images onto canvas. Following this process, he would apply acrylic paints to stylize the pieces. These artworks made their debut in 2003 at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York. One of these paintings influenced the world of fashion, specifically Marc Jacobs's Spring 2008 collection for Louis Vuitton.

Prince's Jokes took on various forms. His initial Jokes were simple, hand-written pieces drawn from various joke books. However, as the artist progressed, these early jokes evolved into more intricate and substantial artworks when combined with suitable imagery. His primary objective was to pair jokes with pictures that had no apparent connection, thus creating obscure and peculiar relationships. During the 1980s and 1990s, this particular style of juxtaposing brief sentences with imagery gained popularity, with Barbara Kruger being one of the most renowned artists to employ this approach. Prince's jokes predominantly consist of satirical one-liners that comment on topics such as religion, marital relationships, and his personal experiences with women.

It's essential to note that Richard Prince employed the technique of modern rephotography and demonstrated his ability to blend digital and analog media. The application of an analog medium, acrylic, to a digitized print, inkjet, creates a unique bridge between traditional and contemporary artistic processes.

Around 2007, Richard Prince's paintings marked a departure from his earlier kitschy, poster-like creations and shifted towards more traditional styles of figurative art. Prince's newest pieces, created between 2013 and 2015, involved pornographic inkjet prints overlaid with acrylic paint, resembling the style of Willem de Kooning. In these recent works, Prince experimented with the distortion of human faces, hands, and feet.