RICHARD PRINCE

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

Contents
The nurse paintings
Technique
Subjects
Titles
Current Works
Guggenheim Retrospective
Bibliography
See also
External links

The nurse paintings


'''Nurse paintings''' is a series of paintings of nurses by Prince based on the covers of pulp romance novels.
Nurse painting "Sonic Nurse" on Sonic Youth music album cover.

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 pioneered the technique of modern rephotography and this series is notable for the technique of layering digital and 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 19 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

★ Danger Nurse at Work, 93 x 56 inches

★ Doctor's Nurse, 58 x 36 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 fist 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 imputs. 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.
Guggenheim Retrospective

Richard Prince: Spiritual America
September 28, 2007–January 9, 2008
This critical overview of Richard Prince's career is the most comprehensive examination of the celebrated American artist's work to date. The exhibition highlights Prince's contributions to the development of contemporary art, bringing together key examples of his photographs, paintings, sculptures, and works on paper in an installation that integrates the various series comprising his oeuvre.
Prince's work has been among the most innovative art produced in the United States during the past 30 years. His deceptively simple act in 1977 of rephotographing advertising images and presenting them as his own ushered in an entirely new, critical approach to art-making—one that questioned notions of originality and the privileged status of the unique aesthetic object. Prince's technique involves appropriation; he pilfers freely from the vast image bank of popular culture to create works that simultaneously embrace and critique a quintessentially American sensibility: the Marlboro Man, muscle cars, biker chicks, off-color jokes, gag cartoons, and pulp fiction. While previous examinations of his art have emphasized its central role as a catalyst for postmodernist criticism, the Guggenheim exhibition and its accompanying catalogue also focus on the work's iconography and how it registers prevalent themes in our social landscape, including a fascination with rebellion, an obsession with fame, and a preoccupation with the tawdry and the illicit.
Organized by Nancy Spector, Chief Curator, in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition brings together key examples from the numerous series comprising Prince's oeuvre, including early appropriated photographs, as well as photographic series, such as Cowboys, Girlfriends and Upstates; painted canvases such as Jokes, White Paintings, Check Paintings, and Nurses; and the Hood sculptures. Long interested in the display of his work as part of his overall conceptual practice, Prince has a history of creating special environments for his art. His exhibition at the Guggenheim follows suit, allowing him to present a summation of his achievements to date in an installation that fills the entire Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda and two adjacent galleries, interspersing works of various dates and mediums.

Bibliography



★ ''Richard Prince Nurse Paintings''. Distributed Art Publishers. ISBN 0-9703422-1-7

Richard Prince: Untitled (couple), , Michael, Newman, The MIT Press, 2007, 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

External links



Richard Prince's website

Richard Prince interviewing the American artist Alex Katz

Richard Prince interviewing the German artist Walter Dahn
'The nurse paintings'

Nurse paintings on Richard Prince's website

The Center for Nursing Advocacy comments

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