Richard Prince

Richard Prince – Cowboys, jokes, and half-naked nurses

Richard Prince was born on 6 August 1949 in the former Panama Canal Zone. The now world-famous American representative of Appropriation Art owed his first solo exhibition to the Ellen Stragow Gallery in New York which showed a good instinct in 1976 and put the future superstar in the spotlight. In the 1980s, he created the world-famous pictorial series Cowboys which Richard Prince produced by re-photographing – as the artist himself calls his work - cuttings from advertisement photographs which the Swiss photographer Hannes Schmid had made for the cigarette company Malboro. At least two pictures from this series were sold for millions by the renowned auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s. A further focus of Richard Prince’s art are the so-called Jokes, pictures which often consist only of a short, written joke, sometimes enhanced by a caricature or a symbolic drawing. His Nurse Paintings also became popular, depicting partly pornographic collages with the recurring motif of the ‘nurse’. 

The controversial question: Great art or cheeky theft?

Richard Prince produces many of his artworks based on images posted on Instagram by people unknown to him. He garnishes these often only with a little text or a smiley and sells them for noteworthy amounts as his own works without asking the actual creators and rights holders for permission or sharing the substantial profits with them. He likes to choose revealing motifs with erotic connotations for his work. This approach has brought Prince much criticism – he and his supporters have been confronted with accusations of sexism and sometimes were calls for a boycott. The artist himself is unaware of any blame and sees his methods covered by the American law of ‘fair use’. Richard Prince shows much more sensitivity with regards to his own work: As he disagreed with the administration of the US President Donald Trump, he subsequently withdrew his authorship of a picture he had sold to Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner. He refunded the purchase price back to the collectors. 

Context as art idea; passion for Lolita

For Prince, the core of his art idea lies in the appropriation of other people’s images: It is about context, about questioning the authorship, the relations and references of a work. The interpretation varies with the context in which a picture is placed, and it is precisely in the production and emphasis of this new context created by him that Prince sees his creative achievement, his genuine artwork. Apart from his text-oriented Jokes series, the fine artist Richard Prince is also interested in the written word with the classic novel Lolita from the pen of the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov. He collects this with a passion – and exclusively in the form of rare first editions. Richard Prince has participated in the Venice Biennale (1988) and Documenta 9 in Kassel (1992) and his works decorate collections in numerous American and European museums, including the Hamburg collections of Falckenberg and Reinking as well as the Goetz Collection in Munich and the Sprengel Museum in Hannover.