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Lot Essay
Executed in 2008, Richard Prince’s Back to the Garden belongs to a series of visually striking works that have become known as the artist’s Canal Zone paintings. Featuring figures in a lush, verdant setting, and rendered on a panoramic scale, the present work is a bold canvas in the grand tradition of the artist’s Cowboys and Nurse appropriation works. Using photographic imagery of nude women, their faces obscured with painted white lozenges, alongside a bare-chested Rastafarian seen riding a donkey, Prince manipulates their meaning as a biting commentary on our image-infatuated society. The photographs used in the present work were taken by the French photographer Patrick Cariou, and the artist’s use of them are part of his ongoing dialogue of how we use and understand images. Having spent his career culling imagery from books and magazines, Back to the Garden is a powerful postmodern critique of a vast, wide-ranging set of influences.
image.png image.png Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897 – 1898. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
In 2007, Richard Prince purchased a book of photographs by Cariou. The publication, called Yes Rasta, was shot on location in Jamaica and featured dozens of black-and-white photographs of Rastafarians living there. Prince created a collage from images in Cariou’s book, which he titled “Canal Zone,” a reference to the sub-tropical landscape of Panama, where Prince was born. The following year, Prince expanded upon the theme, appropriating more pictures from Yes Rasta into a new series of large-scale paintings, of which the present work is an example.
To create the present work, Prince used an inkjet printer to create large-scale, black-and-white copies which he then applied directly to the canvas surface, using white paint instead of glue. Prince let the excess paint seep and drip, leaving them as evidence of his working process. He covered the women’s faces with white, leaving them completely anonymous, a technique which ratchets up the evocative quality of the already sexualized imagery. The women were all nude, their bodies contorted into strange poses that seemed to emphasize and exaggerate their own nakedness. Alongside these women were the Rastafarians from Cariou’s book, also applied to the canvas in the same manner, with the white paint dripping down the surface.
In 2011, the Canal Zone paintings became the subject of a lawsuit when Patrick Cariou sued Richard Prince, claiming copyright infringement. A court in the Southern District of New York ruled in Cariou’s favor, stating that Prince did not modify or transform the imagery significantly enough to constitute “fair use.” This high-profile copyright case sent shock waves through the art world, as it had implications for many artists who obtained their source imagery from a variety of different media. This strategy of “appropriation” was a hallmark of 1980s Postmodernism, a movement which Richard Prince pioneered when he re-photographed magazine ads and exhibited them as new work. His iconic Cowboys and Nurse paintings are two of the most well-known series that relied on this strategy. In 2014, an appeal brought to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the decision of the lower court, ruling largely in favor of Prince. They found that the Canal Zone paintings were permissible under “fair use” because they had a “different character” from the source material and gave it a “new expression”. This appeals ruling meant a great deal to many artists in America.
Back to the Garden stands as a postmodern critique of an extensive, far-reaching set of influences, ranging from Paul Gauguin’s paintings of Tahitian girls and women, to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, to de Kooning’s distorted female figures. Picasso, in his use of African masks, and Gauguin, in his sexualized paintings of Tahitian girls, exaggerated the concept of the “exotic other,” and used these visual motifs as shorthand for a sexualized libido, which they associated with Africa and the South Pacific. Back to the Garden mimics much of these earlier motifs, with subtle twists. The vibrant, colorful jungles of Gauguin’s landscapes are bleached out, leached of all color and warmth. The African masks are the white lozenge shapes, mimicking the black bars used by censors to mask the sitter’s identity. The painting’s title implies a return to Eden, but instead presents an unfamiliar world in which we are challenged to rethink our assumptions and not just passively consume the deluge of daily images that wash over us.
image.png image.png Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897 – 1898. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
In 2007, Richard Prince purchased a book of photographs by Cariou. The publication, called Yes Rasta, was shot on location in Jamaica and featured dozens of black-and-white photographs of Rastafarians living there. Prince created a collage from images in Cariou’s book, which he titled “Canal Zone,” a reference to the sub-tropical landscape of Panama, where Prince was born. The following year, Prince expanded upon the theme, appropriating more pictures from Yes Rasta into a new series of large-scale paintings, of which the present work is an example.
To create the present work, Prince used an inkjet printer to create large-scale, black-and-white copies which he then applied directly to the canvas surface, using white paint instead of glue. Prince let the excess paint seep and drip, leaving them as evidence of his working process. He covered the women’s faces with white, leaving them completely anonymous, a technique which ratchets up the evocative quality of the already sexualized imagery. The women were all nude, their bodies contorted into strange poses that seemed to emphasize and exaggerate their own nakedness. Alongside these women were the Rastafarians from Cariou’s book, also applied to the canvas in the same manner, with the white paint dripping down the surface.
In 2011, the Canal Zone paintings became the subject of a lawsuit when Patrick Cariou sued Richard Prince, claiming copyright infringement. A court in the Southern District of New York ruled in Cariou’s favor, stating that Prince did not modify or transform the imagery significantly enough to constitute “fair use.” This high-profile copyright case sent shock waves through the art world, as it had implications for many artists who obtained their source imagery from a variety of different media. This strategy of “appropriation” was a hallmark of 1980s Postmodernism, a movement which Richard Prince pioneered when he re-photographed magazine ads and exhibited them as new work. His iconic Cowboys and Nurse paintings are two of the most well-known series that relied on this strategy. In 2014, an appeal brought to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the decision of the lower court, ruling largely in favor of Prince. They found that the Canal Zone paintings were permissible under “fair use” because they had a “different character” from the source material and gave it a “new expression”. This appeals ruling meant a great deal to many artists in America.
Back to the Garden stands as a postmodern critique of an extensive, far-reaching set of influences, ranging from Paul Gauguin’s paintings of Tahitian girls and women, to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, to de Kooning’s distorted female figures. Picasso, in his use of African masks, and Gauguin, in his sexualized paintings of Tahitian girls, exaggerated the concept of the “exotic other,” and used these visual motifs as shorthand for a sexualized libido, which they associated with Africa and the South Pacific. Back to the Garden mimics much of these earlier motifs, with subtle twists. The vibrant, colorful jungles of Gauguin’s landscapes are bleached out, leached of all color and warmth. The African masks are the white lozenge shapes, mimicking the black bars used by censors to mask the sitter’s identity. The painting’s title implies a return to Eden, but instead presents an unfamiliar world in which we are challenged to rethink our assumptions and not just passively consume the deluge of daily images that wash over us.