.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Mesmeric and arresting, Double Nurse is a sui generis example which inaugurated Richard Prince’s acclaimed series of Nurse paintings. Painted in 2001, Double Nurse is utterly singular—it is the only work from the legendary series to feature two towering figures and is the largest example to come to auction. The work’s early execution date and unique iconography place the work as one of the earliest—if not the first—works in this foundational and massively influential series. Double Nurse’s iconography is plucked from the cover of a pulp romance novel; Prince uses the then-novel process of inkjet printing to reproduce his referent at epic scale across his canvas before bringing the image to life with his vivid painterly palette. Obscuring the cover’s original publishing text—the title, author, and blurb—Prince evacuates the image from its source, placing the dual nurse figures into an arresting new context which emphasizes their facial features and clasped hands. Prince surrounds the figures with repetitive lists of maladies scrawled in black paint which run down the composition in five segmented columns. Colliding several simultaneous symbolic signifiers for the nurse in literary and popular culture—as femme fatale or angel of mercy, as deviant or savior—Double Nurse serves as a poignant reflection on the dueling realities of turn-of-the-century America, bridled on the one hand with unmatched prosperity and uninhibited swagger while haunted by the specter of political violence. Summarizing the series, Nancy Spector describes the Nurses as “sinister hospital bandits, terrifying in their proximity to blood, bodily processes, and death,” who embody various sociosexual stereotypes: “Good Samaritan, naughty seductress, old battle-ax, and devil incarnate. He depicts each figure as both vamp and victim, undone by desire” (N. Spector, “Nowhere Man, in Richard Prince: Spiritual America, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, pp. 52-53). Richard Prince’s mirrored nurses in Double Nurse allow these many contrasting guises to coexist as potentialities in paint, coalescing into an autobiographic tableau revealing the deeper layers of Prince’s psyche.
To create Double Nurse, Richard Prince reproduced the cover of Adeline McElfresh’s Dr. Jane Comes Home. Drawing on the legacy of appropriation which Prince developed alongside Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger in the 1980s, Prince here retains the facial features and hand details from his original image while covering the rest of the composition with vivid shades of white, obliterating most textual traces and covering up the book’s central spine. Prince uses thick brushstrokes of tans, creams, and pinks to vividly emphasize the nurses’ skin, allowing his paint to drip down the composition in a series of striking parallel linear paths. He similarly embellishes the nurses’ masks and scrub caps with layers of white paint, adding a compelling physicality to these elements and offsetting them against the white composition. The righthand nurse’s face is cloaked in a thin wash of white paint which acts as a diaphanous veil partially covering her eyes, which stare straight toward the viewer. The artist meanwhile makes the figures’ hands barely discernable with light washes of pigment, blurring the original pose into a vague organic form. This dueling process of veiling and enhancing would come to play a critical role throughout the Nurse series, and here one observes Prince working out with paint the methods and techniques which will populate later works in the series.
The artist gives a vivid recollection of how he conceived the nurse in Double Nurse. He had previously purchased a shoebox full of Nurse paperbacks at a flea market in the late 1990s—a noted bibliophile, Prince’s collecting of titles has become an integral part of his artistic process. In this sense Prince mirrors van Gogh, an avid reader who occasionally turned to the risqué ‘Yellow Books’ for compositional and subjective inspiration. Prince left his pulp fiction fallow until 2001, when “I brought them back out, I looked at them, and at the time what I was reading in the news was very disturbing, and the idea came into my head that everybody needed a nurse. And I remembered collecting these Nurse paperbacks” (R. Prince, quoted in “Deposition of Richard Prince” in Donald Graham V. Richard Prince, United States District Court, Southern District of New York, pp. 74-75). Having finally found a compelling subject for his moment, he tore the entire cover off of Dr. Jane Comes Home and inkjetted the image onto his canvas. Appraising the work, he decided to start painting. “The first Nurse paintings were done all in white. I was trying to quote the whiteness of the nurse—of an operating room and a nurse’s uniform” (ibid.). Unique to Double Nurse is the written text flowing down the composition. As Prince explains, “On the painting, I made a list of all the kinds of things that could happen to you in the world... whatever a nurse could, perhaps, help you with” (ibid.).
Prince’s didacticism in the face of global strife follows an important tradition of textual art from the twentieth century. Cy Twombly’s pairing of poetry, myth, and history wrought works like Apollo (1975, Cy Twombly Foundation) where names are scribbled in a similarly informal black script, a format which Joseph Beuys’ blackboard paintings also echo. Painted text reemerged in the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, while Prince’s close friend and contemporary Christopher Wool also explored the function of black text on white. Another contemporary, Glenn Ligon, articulated a corresponding interest in repetition and obscuring with his “Door Paintings,” where the lower part of his stenciled compositions shows each white letter blending together into a cacophonic mass of illegible letters and symbols, similar to the text on the lower right register of the present work. The profusion of text, both residual from the reference image and added by the artist, creates a deeply affective, intimate vision of the artist. Nancy Spector writes how in his earlier works, and especially with his Nurses, “Prince mapped his own desires and fears, forcing a confrontation with himself, however mutable and difficult to pin down that may be. Like the refracted mirror of our image-saturated society, he has always promoted multiple readings of his persona” (N. Spector, op. cit., p. 52).
In this vein, Double Nurse functions as a self-portrait, revealing Prince’s most profound worries as he grappled with the events occurring around him, leaning on the comforting yet complicated symbol of the nurse as a salve. Double Nurse offers an enticing point of origin for the later Nurse paintings which premiered in 2003 at Gladstone Gallery in New York. Reviewing the show, critic David Rimanelli writes how the works were a “bloody, drippy splatter sampling of AbEx gesturalism... these sumptuous canvases were a return to form—smart, cheap, expensive, snide” (D. Rimanelli, “Best of 2003,” Artforum, vol. 42, no. 4, December 2003, p. 116). While his later Nurses embraced an erotic emphasis on the nurses, here they become both comforting sources of aid and ominous portents of hazard—where there are nurses, there is sickness. Double Nurse is a singular example out of Prince’s entire oeuvre which deconstructs the many masks, layers, and veils places around his artworks in order to provide a searing glimpse into the artist’s anxieties.
To create Double Nurse, Richard Prince reproduced the cover of Adeline McElfresh’s Dr. Jane Comes Home. Drawing on the legacy of appropriation which Prince developed alongside Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger in the 1980s, Prince here retains the facial features and hand details from his original image while covering the rest of the composition with vivid shades of white, obliterating most textual traces and covering up the book’s central spine. Prince uses thick brushstrokes of tans, creams, and pinks to vividly emphasize the nurses’ skin, allowing his paint to drip down the composition in a series of striking parallel linear paths. He similarly embellishes the nurses’ masks and scrub caps with layers of white paint, adding a compelling physicality to these elements and offsetting them against the white composition. The righthand nurse’s face is cloaked in a thin wash of white paint which acts as a diaphanous veil partially covering her eyes, which stare straight toward the viewer. The artist meanwhile makes the figures’ hands barely discernable with light washes of pigment, blurring the original pose into a vague organic form. This dueling process of veiling and enhancing would come to play a critical role throughout the Nurse series, and here one observes Prince working out with paint the methods and techniques which will populate later works in the series.
The artist gives a vivid recollection of how he conceived the nurse in Double Nurse. He had previously purchased a shoebox full of Nurse paperbacks at a flea market in the late 1990s—a noted bibliophile, Prince’s collecting of titles has become an integral part of his artistic process. In this sense Prince mirrors van Gogh, an avid reader who occasionally turned to the risqué ‘Yellow Books’ for compositional and subjective inspiration. Prince left his pulp fiction fallow until 2001, when “I brought them back out, I looked at them, and at the time what I was reading in the news was very disturbing, and the idea came into my head that everybody needed a nurse. And I remembered collecting these Nurse paperbacks” (R. Prince, quoted in “Deposition of Richard Prince” in Donald Graham V. Richard Prince, United States District Court, Southern District of New York, pp. 74-75). Having finally found a compelling subject for his moment, he tore the entire cover off of Dr. Jane Comes Home and inkjetted the image onto his canvas. Appraising the work, he decided to start painting. “The first Nurse paintings were done all in white. I was trying to quote the whiteness of the nurse—of an operating room and a nurse’s uniform” (ibid.). Unique to Double Nurse is the written text flowing down the composition. As Prince explains, “On the painting, I made a list of all the kinds of things that could happen to you in the world... whatever a nurse could, perhaps, help you with” (ibid.).
Prince’s didacticism in the face of global strife follows an important tradition of textual art from the twentieth century. Cy Twombly’s pairing of poetry, myth, and history wrought works like Apollo (1975, Cy Twombly Foundation) where names are scribbled in a similarly informal black script, a format which Joseph Beuys’ blackboard paintings also echo. Painted text reemerged in the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, while Prince’s close friend and contemporary Christopher Wool also explored the function of black text on white. Another contemporary, Glenn Ligon, articulated a corresponding interest in repetition and obscuring with his “Door Paintings,” where the lower part of his stenciled compositions shows each white letter blending together into a cacophonic mass of illegible letters and symbols, similar to the text on the lower right register of the present work. The profusion of text, both residual from the reference image and added by the artist, creates a deeply affective, intimate vision of the artist. Nancy Spector writes how in his earlier works, and especially with his Nurses, “Prince mapped his own desires and fears, forcing a confrontation with himself, however mutable and difficult to pin down that may be. Like the refracted mirror of our image-saturated society, he has always promoted multiple readings of his persona” (N. Spector, op. cit., p. 52).
In this vein, Double Nurse functions as a self-portrait, revealing Prince’s most profound worries as he grappled with the events occurring around him, leaning on the comforting yet complicated symbol of the nurse as a salve. Double Nurse offers an enticing point of origin for the later Nurse paintings which premiered in 2003 at Gladstone Gallery in New York. Reviewing the show, critic David Rimanelli writes how the works were a “bloody, drippy splatter sampling of AbEx gesturalism... these sumptuous canvases were a return to form—smart, cheap, expensive, snide” (D. Rimanelli, “Best of 2003,” Artforum, vol. 42, no. 4, December 2003, p. 116). While his later Nurses embraced an erotic emphasis on the nurses, here they become both comforting sources of aid and ominous portents of hazard—where there are nurses, there is sickness. Double Nurse is a singular example out of Prince’s entire oeuvre which deconstructs the many masks, layers, and veils places around his artworks in order to provide a searing glimpse into the artist’s anxieties.