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Lot Essay
One of the earliest of Richard Prince’s famed Joke paintings, Untitled (The housewife and the grocer) exemplifies the unique critique of American popular culture that was pioneered by Prince and his fellow Pictures Generations artists. As a natural successor to Andy Warhol and Pop Art, Prince mined the world of pulp fiction, magazine advertisements, fashion photography, and even art history itself to produce works that sat at the cutting edge of contemporary art. For his Joke paintings, he traveled back in time to the corny quips told by TV comedians such as Milton Berle in the 1940s and ‘50s. The housewife and the grocer work sardonically challenges the nature of America’s sense of humor by exposing her dark fantasies and secret reverie.
Rendered in bright pink lettering upon a pale blue ground, Untitled (The housewife and the grocer) displays the visual and conceptual richness of this important series. The artist’s choice of pink text—traditionally a color associated with femininity, propriety, and innocence—is at odds with the sexual nature of the joke itself, and in choosing a blue (and its associations with masculinity) background adds yet another level of humor to the painting’s meaning. In addition, although a hand-painted object, Prince leaves no trace of the artist. Indeed, the present work embodies many of the hallmarks of Minimalist and Conceptual Art which it is working hard to challenge. A two-dimensional monochromatic panel of pure color, it is a beautiful, balanced object by composition alone. The joke’s text, however, flips its identity away from the hallowed field of ‘high art’ and transports it into the realm of mass culture.
Painted in 1987, Prince’s decision to paint a canvas was itself a radical one for the time, having been primarily occupied with photography. When asked about the origin of this body of work, the artist explained: “Beginning the jokes was like starting over...At the time artists were casting sculptures in bronze, making huge paintings, talking about prices and clothes and cars and spending vast amounts of money. So, I wrote jokes on little pieces of paper and sold them for $10 each. I had a hard time selling them. One dealer bought two and asked for a 10% discount. So, I decided that every six months I’d double the price. All this was possible because no one was looking at my work. That’s a fairly good position sometimes. You can get away with a lot of things” (R. Prince, quoted in S. Morgan, “Tell Me Everything: Richard Prince Interviewed by Stuart Morgan,” Artscribe International, No. 73, January-February 1989, p. 48).
The subversive spirit was key to the work of the Pictures Generation, which included such luminaries as Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, and Jack Goldstein. Following the Pop artists of the 1960s, who appropriated images from commercial products and advertisements, the artists of the Pictures Generation understood that mass media imagery is imbedded with ideological narratives that perpetuate social structures. Where Cindy Sherman re-performed image-based mediums of film, photography and advertising to show how sex, gender and sexuality are constructed, Price re-photographed these mediums, upping the ante on this conversation by linking class, American consumerism and masculine desire to our understanding of identity. His fascination with cowboys, bikers, cars, the iconic Marlboro Man referred to archetypes of the American dream.
For the present work, culling through hundreds of jokes, Prince essentially created a body of work that revealed the secret taboos of postwar America, a seemingly conventional, well-ordered society. The off-color wisecracks were in direct contradiction to the buttoned-up 1950s and ‘60s era. They addressed the typically off-limits topics of sexism, racism, violence and homosexuality. As the curator and museum director Lisa Phillips has observed, “He understood that in these jokes...there were recurring patterns and subversive, often inflammatory content. They dealt with taboos…abandonment and terror. It was also a time when he confessed to going ‘after images that have more to do with me personally’” (L. Phillips, "People Keep Asking: An Introduction," in L. Phillips, Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 42).
Beginning as they did in the mid-1980s, the Joke paintings bear witness to the artist’s withdrawal from his earlier photography in favor of a steadfast and determined return to painting itself. This, coming at a time when painting was declared “dead,” by the art critic Douglas Crimp in 1981, was a radical act. In Untitled (The Housewife and the Grocer), Prince has miraculously forged a new path forward.
Rendered in bright pink lettering upon a pale blue ground, Untitled (The housewife and the grocer) displays the visual and conceptual richness of this important series. The artist’s choice of pink text—traditionally a color associated with femininity, propriety, and innocence—is at odds with the sexual nature of the joke itself, and in choosing a blue (and its associations with masculinity) background adds yet another level of humor to the painting’s meaning. In addition, although a hand-painted object, Prince leaves no trace of the artist. Indeed, the present work embodies many of the hallmarks of Minimalist and Conceptual Art which it is working hard to challenge. A two-dimensional monochromatic panel of pure color, it is a beautiful, balanced object by composition alone. The joke’s text, however, flips its identity away from the hallowed field of ‘high art’ and transports it into the realm of mass culture.
Painted in 1987, Prince’s decision to paint a canvas was itself a radical one for the time, having been primarily occupied with photography. When asked about the origin of this body of work, the artist explained: “Beginning the jokes was like starting over...At the time artists were casting sculptures in bronze, making huge paintings, talking about prices and clothes and cars and spending vast amounts of money. So, I wrote jokes on little pieces of paper and sold them for $10 each. I had a hard time selling them. One dealer bought two and asked for a 10% discount. So, I decided that every six months I’d double the price. All this was possible because no one was looking at my work. That’s a fairly good position sometimes. You can get away with a lot of things” (R. Prince, quoted in S. Morgan, “Tell Me Everything: Richard Prince Interviewed by Stuart Morgan,” Artscribe International, No. 73, January-February 1989, p. 48).
The subversive spirit was key to the work of the Pictures Generation, which included such luminaries as Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, and Jack Goldstein. Following the Pop artists of the 1960s, who appropriated images from commercial products and advertisements, the artists of the Pictures Generation understood that mass media imagery is imbedded with ideological narratives that perpetuate social structures. Where Cindy Sherman re-performed image-based mediums of film, photography and advertising to show how sex, gender and sexuality are constructed, Price re-photographed these mediums, upping the ante on this conversation by linking class, American consumerism and masculine desire to our understanding of identity. His fascination with cowboys, bikers, cars, the iconic Marlboro Man referred to archetypes of the American dream.
For the present work, culling through hundreds of jokes, Prince essentially created a body of work that revealed the secret taboos of postwar America, a seemingly conventional, well-ordered society. The off-color wisecracks were in direct contradiction to the buttoned-up 1950s and ‘60s era. They addressed the typically off-limits topics of sexism, racism, violence and homosexuality. As the curator and museum director Lisa Phillips has observed, “He understood that in these jokes...there were recurring patterns and subversive, often inflammatory content. They dealt with taboos…abandonment and terror. It was also a time when he confessed to going ‘after images that have more to do with me personally’” (L. Phillips, "People Keep Asking: An Introduction," in L. Phillips, Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 42).
Beginning as they did in the mid-1980s, the Joke paintings bear witness to the artist’s withdrawal from his earlier photography in favor of a steadfast and determined return to painting itself. This, coming at a time when painting was declared “dead,” by the art critic Douglas Crimp in 1981, was a radical act. In Untitled (The Housewife and the Grocer), Prince has miraculously forged a new path forward.