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Lot Essay
Painted in 2006, Richard Prince's Untitled (de Kooning) updates his unique brand of appropriation, replacing his use of pulp fiction novels and minimal joke paintings with reproductions of de Kooning paintings and photographs of adult models. He then embellishes these with his own flourishes of acrylic paint in the style of Willem de Kooning.
Like his earlier work featuring cowboys and nurses, Prince makes extensive use of appropriated images as the basis for this work. The artist, who formerly worked as a picture archivist and researcher, knows the ins and outs of the debris of our modern, media-saturated age. By combining material from bodybuilding magazines with Willem de Kooning's expressionist portraits of women, he produces an amalgam of highly charged sexual imagery. We can see Prince's unmistakable bravura, which fed into his creation, in the wild and expressive strokes, as he pays tribute to de Kooning, outlining the contours of the women's bodies.
The transference of the source material to canvas by inkjet printer adds an extra level of removal and manufacture to an already mass-produced image, with the Benday dots visible through the wash of paint clearly evoking Roy Lichtenstein's own transformative Pop appropriations. Prince goes a step further than Lichtenstein, however, by directly employing the mechanized production techniques of the mass media rather than replicating the effect by hand. The amalgamation of this digital process with manually applied materials nevertheless underlines Prince's intention of creating a unique image, even as he continues to test the bounds of authorship. Prince offsets the self-consciously sensual overlay of pigment he applied to Untitled (de Kooning) with its deliberately over-the-top chromatic range and aggressive application, which smothers any sense of preciousness or 'prettiness."
In Untitled (de Kooning), Prince has taken two seemingly opposed images and, together with his own artistic subversivness, has created a new image of strange apotheosis, smuggling "low" art into a "high" art and ravishing us with pure visual pleasure.
Like his earlier work featuring cowboys and nurses, Prince makes extensive use of appropriated images as the basis for this work. The artist, who formerly worked as a picture archivist and researcher, knows the ins and outs of the debris of our modern, media-saturated age. By combining material from bodybuilding magazines with Willem de Kooning's expressionist portraits of women, he produces an amalgam of highly charged sexual imagery. We can see Prince's unmistakable bravura, which fed into his creation, in the wild and expressive strokes, as he pays tribute to de Kooning, outlining the contours of the women's bodies.
The transference of the source material to canvas by inkjet printer adds an extra level of removal and manufacture to an already mass-produced image, with the Benday dots visible through the wash of paint clearly evoking Roy Lichtenstein's own transformative Pop appropriations. Prince goes a step further than Lichtenstein, however, by directly employing the mechanized production techniques of the mass media rather than replicating the effect by hand. The amalgamation of this digital process with manually applied materials nevertheless underlines Prince's intention of creating a unique image, even as he continues to test the bounds of authorship. Prince offsets the self-consciously sensual overlay of pigment he applied to Untitled (de Kooning) with its deliberately over-the-top chromatic range and aggressive application, which smothers any sense of preciousness or 'prettiness."
In Untitled (de Kooning), Prince has taken two seemingly opposed images and, together with his own artistic subversivness, has created a new image of strange apotheosis, smuggling "low" art into a "high" art and ravishing us with pure visual pleasure.