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Lot Essay
From Marlboro cowboys to motorbike girls, Richard Prince’s appropriations have acted as a lens through which to reinterpret American mass-culture for four decades. In 2006, Prince turned his recontextualising hand to another artist’s work for the first time. Picking up a catalogue of Willem de Kooning’s work (Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure, Princeton 2002), Prince selected a number of paintings for visual defacement, juxtapositionally creating homages to the great abstract expressionist. The current work is an extremely dynamic and characterful example of this series. Against a fiery backdrop of vibrant orange, worked in spontaneous sweeps of oil crayon, Prince sets a trio of amorphic figures (a smaller, fourth character hovers to the right), their grotesque de Kooning forms animatedly fusing with Prince’s own caricatured mutations, attributed to both his own hand and a separate appropriation of printed media. Here, Prince integrates material found in catalogues and adult magazines, disturbing de Kooning’s tortured forms further with interventions in figurative scale, whilst deconstructing gender polarities by hermaphroditically splicing de Kooning’s women with photographs of the male body. The effect is at once fantastically disturbing and humorously uncanny, blurring boundaries between so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and providing a critical submission into the art-historical canon of the female nude.
What drew Prince to de Kooning in particular? Prince has certainly been interested in the female nude throughout his career, appropriating soft pornographic and nude photography for other bodies of his work. However, Price was also attracted to de Kooning’s antecedental practice as an appropriation artist. In Woman (1952; held in the collection of the Met Museum, New York), de Kooning collages the mouth of the sitter from a cigarette advertisement; as Prince explained, ‘when [de Kooning] collaged the Camel cigarette “T-zone” smile onto the heads of his women, it was the beginning of Pop art. That’s like 1953–54? That’s just my opinion’ (R. Prince, ‘Everyone Knows This is Nowhere’, interview with Domenick Ammirati, Modern Painters, 18 September 2007, reproduced online, https://www. domenickammirati.com/index.php?/ongoing/ everyone-knows-this-is-nowhere/ [accessed 29 August 2017]). Surely inspired, Prince responds to this work with his own de Kooning series, but the method here is somewhat more convoluted. He begins by drawing, painting and collaging over the reproduced image, creating these hermaphroditic characters in the process, before enlarging the result onto laserjet-printed canvas. Finally, Prince injures the composition further with spontaneous, sweeping brushstrokes, reminiscently recalling the gestural painting of his modernist muse. The resulting image is a fascinating figurative marriage of de Kooning’s unnerving models and Prince’s crude caricatures and eerie photomontage. With these interventions, Prince has succeeded in extensively hyperbolising the intentions of de Kooning, whilst simultaneously clouding the visual distinctions between the work of both, creating a truly original study of the female nude and furthering the potential possibilities of appropriation art.
What drew Prince to de Kooning in particular? Prince has certainly been interested in the female nude throughout his career, appropriating soft pornographic and nude photography for other bodies of his work. However, Price was also attracted to de Kooning’s antecedental practice as an appropriation artist. In Woman (1952; held in the collection of the Met Museum, New York), de Kooning collages the mouth of the sitter from a cigarette advertisement; as Prince explained, ‘when [de Kooning] collaged the Camel cigarette “T-zone” smile onto the heads of his women, it was the beginning of Pop art. That’s like 1953–54? That’s just my opinion’ (R. Prince, ‘Everyone Knows This is Nowhere’, interview with Domenick Ammirati, Modern Painters, 18 September 2007, reproduced online, https://www. domenickammirati.com/index.php?/ongoing/ everyone-knows-this-is-nowhere/ [accessed 29 August 2017]). Surely inspired, Prince responds to this work with his own de Kooning series, but the method here is somewhat more convoluted. He begins by drawing, painting and collaging over the reproduced image, creating these hermaphroditic characters in the process, before enlarging the result onto laserjet-printed canvas. Finally, Prince injures the composition further with spontaneous, sweeping brushstrokes, reminiscently recalling the gestural painting of his modernist muse. The resulting image is a fascinating figurative marriage of de Kooning’s unnerving models and Prince’s crude caricatures and eerie photomontage. With these interventions, Prince has succeeded in extensively hyperbolising the intentions of de Kooning, whilst simultaneously clouding the visual distinctions between the work of both, creating a truly original study of the female nude and furthering the potential possibilities of appropriation art.