11 things to know about Richard Prince

Richard Prince was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1949 — a small territory of the United States initially created to build the Panama Canal. Both of Prince’s parents worked for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the forerunner of the CIA. When Prince was four his parents took him to stay with Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, at Goldeneye — the author’s house in Jamaica. Fact and fiction always seem to have been intertwined for Prince. He has written: ‘Right from the beginning it was always hard to tell the truth.’ Indeed, in a 2007 interview with Vanity Fair, titled ‘Richard Prince’s Outside Streak’, writer Steven Daly wrote: ‘[the artist] faked an interview between himself and British author J. G. Ballard, and you can’t quite tell if Prince is serious when he repeats the old story about his father working for the Office of Strategic Services... and defoliating forests in Vietnam.’

His family left the Canal Zone for Hawaii when he was nine. Just before his 18th birthday Prince returned to Panama to secure dual American/Panamanian citizenship. As he told J. G. Ballard in that Punch magazine ‘interview’ in September 1967, on arrival in Panama he discovered the photograph had fallen out of his passport, and he was held at the airport for five days. He was then sent to the Bahamas, which sent him to London, which sent him to Jamaica, which sent him back, and so on. He crossed the Atlantic five times in three weeks, clocking up 20,000 miles and costing British Airways $13,500 in food and flights, until finally he was allowed to remain in detention on British soil.

A 1956 Time magazine article on Jackson Pollock made Prince believe art could be a career, and he became ‘very attracted to the idea of someone who was by themselves, fairly antisocial, kind of a loner, someone who was non-collaborative.’ After high school he visited Europe, then attended Nasson College, Maine, where he came across a photograph of Franz Kline staring out of his 14th Street window. Seeing also in Kline a ‘man content to be alone, pursuing the outside world from the sanctum of his studio’, Prince took a studio in New York.

...in particular through the technique of ‘rephotographing’ — photographing an existing image rather than something in the natural world. This approach put him in the vanguard of what has come to be known as ‘The Pictures Generation’ — the title of a 2009 exhibition of their work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were a disparate group of artists working in late 1970s and ’80s New York who took to appropriating images from consumer culture and the media, sometimes changing very little from their source material. In rephotographing, the only thing changed by Prince, arguably, is the context, removing images in order to comment on the values and aspirations they transmit. His first appropriation artworks were drawn from Time, where he had a job providing tear sheets of articles and adverts to advertisers and journalists.

...taken from adverts for Marlboro cigarettes from 1980 onwards featuring the ‘Marlboro Man’. Originally photographed by Sam Abell, the adverts present sanitised versions of the Old West. Prince cropped all the text relating to the product and photographed the cowboys. In doing so, his rephotographing highlights the highly posed nature of the photographs, designed to create an image of ideal, contemporary American masculinity that is intended to work subliminally in the original advertisements.

...claimed Prince in a 2003 interview with Artforum. ‘Actually I had no skills,’ he added. ‘I played the camera. I used a cheap commercial lab to blow up the pictures. I made editions of two. I never went into a darkroom.’ Nevertheless his eye for American self-presentation continued to win him acclaim, and he began his ‘Gangs’ series in the early 80s. Here Prince focused on images of sub- and counter-cultures such as surfers, hot-rod enthusiasts, itinerant rockers, heavy metalers and Hells Angels, presented as grids of juxtaposed images of that particular ‘scene’. In 1992 he began a related series entitled ‘Girlfriends’, concentrating on images of biker girls sent into magazines by their boyfriends.

...taking inspiration from his series of ‘Nurse Paintings’. Begun in 2003, the ‘Nurse Paintings’ use cover images from pulp romance novels with titles like Surfer Nurse, Naughty Nurse, Millionaire Nurse, and Dude Ranch Nurse, blown up and hand-finished with acrylic so that all but the book’s title and the nurse image is covered. In 2007, Marc Jacobs asked Prince to collaborate with him for the Louis Vuitton Spring 2008 collection, at which time Prince was concentrating on a series of ‘Nurse Paintings’ set in exotic cities ‘after dark’. Prince suggested a collection of Louis Vuitton ‘after dark’.

In 2014, Prince exhibited 38 new works at Gagosian in New York entitled ‘New Portraits’, consisting of screenshots of his Instagram feed printed onto large canvases. The images were generally taken from the accounts of models, artists and celebrities, with comments from Prince’s own account underneath. The response was passionate, with critics, commentators and the original photographers themselves coming out strongly both for and against the ‘New Portraits’. Karley Sciortino — a Vogue sex columnist — called her inclusion ‘an honour’.