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Descriptif du lot
Bathed in the glow of its own mythology, the present work is a radiant vision from Richard Prince’s landmark series of Cowboys. Icons of twentieth-century culture, these dazzling images stand among the most important works in the artist’s groundbreaking appropriation practice. Begun in 1980, the Cowboys were made by rephotographing Marlboro cigarette advertisements, cropping out text to focus on the brand’s signature lone ranger. In doing so, Prince invited the viewer to reconsider America’s ultimate heroic archetype: a cinematic symbol of masculinity and bravery, embedded in the popular imagination through the machinations of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. Over the years these works have come to be regarded as self-portraits of sorts, the solitary pioneer reflecting Prince’s own daring crusade through a perilous landscape of cultural tropes and constructs. Executed in 1994, the present work captures the serene, near-abstract spatial harmony that came to define the Cowboys of this period. Moving away from the raw, sexualised energy of Prince’s earlier sources, here the figure and horse traverse an empty, sun-baked landscape, carving a sweeping path through the golden desert sands.
Currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Albertina, Vienna, Prince rose to prominence during the early 1980s. His appropriation practice placed him at the vanguard of what would come to be known as the ‘Pictures Generation’, along with artists such as Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler. Disenchanted by the commercialisation of contemporary culture, these figures sought to reconstruct mass media images from the inside out, raising profound questions about authorship, originality and the transmission of meaning. These issues were particularly pertinent to the young Prince, who was working at Time Life during the 1970s. While clipping articles from magazines for staff writers, he began to collect the adverts that remained behind, analysing their patterns and visual codes. Around 1976 he took the radical step of rephotographing them with a 35mm slide-film camera. In the click of the shutter, their spell was broken. Cropped and enlarged, they revealed the illusory mechanics of their make-up, their surfaces taking on an uncanny abstract quality. The viewer was forced to step back, and to witness—as never before—their artifice.
Confronting the famous ‘Marlboro Man’, the Cowboys were Prince’s breakthrough works. John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and others had popularised the epic sagas of the Wild West in cinema, and from the 1950s onwards Marlboro began to feature the cowboy in its branding. Handsome, rugged and weathered by the wide-open plains, he was an ubiquitous symbol of freedom and self-reliance: a totem of the ‘American dream’. By the 1960s, the image had become so intimately associated with Marlboro that Phillip Morris was able to remove explicit mention of cigarettes from its advertisements altogether. The strength of this connection made the cowboy images all the more alluring to Prince. By removing the text and zooming in on the photograph, the artist sought to strip away its invisible sheen. In doing so, he imbued the image with a new set of visual cues, reframing it as art. The present work’s deeply saturated planes of colour call to mind the abstract canvases of Mark Rothko, or the jagged edifices of Clyfford Still.
‘Of all of Prince’s art,’ writes Rosetta Brooks, ‘the Cowboy works are Prince’s own mask—his self-portrait as a regular guy’ (R. Brooks, Richard Prince, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1992, p. 96). Indeed, in his Self Portrait, 1973–2013, the artist would present himself with a Stetson, a mask and a pistol. Prince had long been attracted to the idea of the artist as a lone free rebel. In 1956 an article on Jackson Pollock had inspired him to contemplate a career in art: ‘I was very attracted to the idea of someone who was by themselves … kind of a loner’, he explained (R. Prince, quoted J. Belcove, ‘The Artist Known As Prince’, W Magazine, June 2000). At college, he admired a photograph of Franz Kline staring out of his window—‘a man content to be alone,’ explains Nancy Spector, ‘pursuing the outside world from the sanctum of his studio’ (N. Spector, ‘Nowhere Man’, in Richard Prince: Spiritual America, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 2007, p. 23). Perhaps the image of the solitary cowboy, blazing a trail through uncharted terrain, spoke to Prince on a more personal level. Here, the figure cuts through the undisturbed sands like an arrow, quietly rupturing the landscape in his wake.
Currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Albertina, Vienna, Prince rose to prominence during the early 1980s. His appropriation practice placed him at the vanguard of what would come to be known as the ‘Pictures Generation’, along with artists such as Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler. Disenchanted by the commercialisation of contemporary culture, these figures sought to reconstruct mass media images from the inside out, raising profound questions about authorship, originality and the transmission of meaning. These issues were particularly pertinent to the young Prince, who was working at Time Life during the 1970s. While clipping articles from magazines for staff writers, he began to collect the adverts that remained behind, analysing their patterns and visual codes. Around 1976 he took the radical step of rephotographing them with a 35mm slide-film camera. In the click of the shutter, their spell was broken. Cropped and enlarged, they revealed the illusory mechanics of their make-up, their surfaces taking on an uncanny abstract quality. The viewer was forced to step back, and to witness—as never before—their artifice.
Confronting the famous ‘Marlboro Man’, the Cowboys were Prince’s breakthrough works. John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and others had popularised the epic sagas of the Wild West in cinema, and from the 1950s onwards Marlboro began to feature the cowboy in its branding. Handsome, rugged and weathered by the wide-open plains, he was an ubiquitous symbol of freedom and self-reliance: a totem of the ‘American dream’. By the 1960s, the image had become so intimately associated with Marlboro that Phillip Morris was able to remove explicit mention of cigarettes from its advertisements altogether. The strength of this connection made the cowboy images all the more alluring to Prince. By removing the text and zooming in on the photograph, the artist sought to strip away its invisible sheen. In doing so, he imbued the image with a new set of visual cues, reframing it as art. The present work’s deeply saturated planes of colour call to mind the abstract canvases of Mark Rothko, or the jagged edifices of Clyfford Still.
‘Of all of Prince’s art,’ writes Rosetta Brooks, ‘the Cowboy works are Prince’s own mask—his self-portrait as a regular guy’ (R. Brooks, Richard Prince, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1992, p. 96). Indeed, in his Self Portrait, 1973–2013, the artist would present himself with a Stetson, a mask and a pistol. Prince had long been attracted to the idea of the artist as a lone free rebel. In 1956 an article on Jackson Pollock had inspired him to contemplate a career in art: ‘I was very attracted to the idea of someone who was by themselves … kind of a loner’, he explained (R. Prince, quoted J. Belcove, ‘The Artist Known As Prince’, W Magazine, June 2000). At college, he admired a photograph of Franz Kline staring out of his window—‘a man content to be alone,’ explains Nancy Spector, ‘pursuing the outside world from the sanctum of his studio’ (N. Spector, ‘Nowhere Man’, in Richard Prince: Spiritual America, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 2007, p. 23). Perhaps the image of the solitary cowboy, blazing a trail through uncharted terrain, spoke to Prince on a more personal level. Here, the figure cuts through the undisturbed sands like an arrow, quietly rupturing the landscape in his wake.