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Lot Essay
'My work is about the contribution I make to it... Those masks are my contribution'
(Prince, quoted in C. Darwent, 'How did Richard Prince produce the most expensive photograph ever?', in The Independent, 22 June 2008, on www.independent.co.uk).
The Taming of Nurse Conway is a painterly intervention into the histrionics of a dime-store romance novel. Executed in 2002, this work belongs to a series of paintings by Richard Prince that focuses on nurses as ciphers of sexual and romantic desire. The composition begins with a vintage paperback, which is enlarged and immersed in sensuously worked layers of pigment that isolate the nurse against a densely atmospheric ground. The head and shoulder portrait of the white uniformed nurse featured in The Taming of Nurse Conway is lifted directly from the cover of the eponymous 1963 book by New Zealand trash novelist Nora Sanderson. Like most illustrations on seedy romance novels, the cover depicts a moment of climax or crisis, yet Prince has erased various parts of the image leaving the protagonist hovering in an ambiguous space bereft of narrative moorings. The once brunette figure has been made a blond (gentlemen prefer them), and her surroundings have been erased by a lush bricolage of radiant hues. Yet the evidence of two men, a doctor and a patient, are just visible below the surface, still haunting the pensive Nurse Conway with their demands. As with all his nurse paintings, Prince has expanded the pocketbook-size book cover of The Taming of Nurse Conway to a heroic scale. He has scanned the original book cover and enlarged onto canvas via ink-jet printing, a relatively high-tech process that is subsequently exposed to the manual labours of his own powerfully gestural painting. The resulting image is filled with direct, passionate brushstrokes that markedly diverge from the cool, ironic distance of Prince's famously re-photographed advertisements of Marlboro men. The convergence of mass-produced imagery and vigorous, dripping paintwork establishes a strange tension between two extremely divergent visual languages. The combination unites the artist's low-culture leanings with the techniques most frequently associated with traditional fine art. It seems the master of appropriation is out to razz the exalted reputation of the post-war action painters, whose familiar methods have presented him with yet another aspect of popular culture to reference.
Instead of isolating and re-presenting the found image as it stands, Prince has instigated a strategy of erasure and alteration to transform the meaning and message of his subject. Perhaps the most significant addition to the picture is the surgical mask that is used to obliterate the identity of all Prince's nurses. The obscuring mask lends the sultry nurse an air of mystery and potential sadism. But it also serves to compound her status as a stereotype, wiping out what little individualized features she has to represent a generic feminine ideal. By gagging his heroines in this way, Prince presents us with a provocative image that appears to reinforce the cultural fixation with women as enigmatic and alluring, both innocent and vamp. The Taming of Nurse Conway can be seen as a continuation of the artist's interest in the ambiguous ways society has chosen to portray women and how women have seemed to want to portray themselves - including raunchy biker chicks, product models, Playboy jokes, and sexy girls-next-door. The fantasy nurse sits more than comfortably within these sub-groups as they all behave as images of titillation. 'I think a lot of the imagery I do create is sexual,' Prince has stated, 'and I hope it does turn people on (quoted in R. Kennedy, 'Two Artists United by Devotion to Women', The New York Times, 22 December 2008, on www.nytimes.com).
Over the past three decades, Prince has created works of art that appropriate distinctive elements of American mass culture, often deconstructing and celebrating them simultaneously. In the Nurse paintings, he has identified the figure of the sensual caregiver as a longstanding embodiment of our culture's overactive imaginations and a familiar object of erotic imaginings. By harnessing this pervasive character type of countless fictions, Prince is not only scrutinizing one of society's most deeply ingrained stereotypes, but also highlighting his longstanding fascination with image constructs and their power.
(Prince, quoted in C. Darwent, 'How did Richard Prince produce the most expensive photograph ever?', in The Independent, 22 June 2008, on www.independent.co.uk).
The Taming of Nurse Conway is a painterly intervention into the histrionics of a dime-store romance novel. Executed in 2002, this work belongs to a series of paintings by Richard Prince that focuses on nurses as ciphers of sexual and romantic desire. The composition begins with a vintage paperback, which is enlarged and immersed in sensuously worked layers of pigment that isolate the nurse against a densely atmospheric ground. The head and shoulder portrait of the white uniformed nurse featured in The Taming of Nurse Conway is lifted directly from the cover of the eponymous 1963 book by New Zealand trash novelist Nora Sanderson. Like most illustrations on seedy romance novels, the cover depicts a moment of climax or crisis, yet Prince has erased various parts of the image leaving the protagonist hovering in an ambiguous space bereft of narrative moorings. The once brunette figure has been made a blond (gentlemen prefer them), and her surroundings have been erased by a lush bricolage of radiant hues. Yet the evidence of two men, a doctor and a patient, are just visible below the surface, still haunting the pensive Nurse Conway with their demands. As with all his nurse paintings, Prince has expanded the pocketbook-size book cover of The Taming of Nurse Conway to a heroic scale. He has scanned the original book cover and enlarged onto canvas via ink-jet printing, a relatively high-tech process that is subsequently exposed to the manual labours of his own powerfully gestural painting. The resulting image is filled with direct, passionate brushstrokes that markedly diverge from the cool, ironic distance of Prince's famously re-photographed advertisements of Marlboro men. The convergence of mass-produced imagery and vigorous, dripping paintwork establishes a strange tension between two extremely divergent visual languages. The combination unites the artist's low-culture leanings with the techniques most frequently associated with traditional fine art. It seems the master of appropriation is out to razz the exalted reputation of the post-war action painters, whose familiar methods have presented him with yet another aspect of popular culture to reference.
Instead of isolating and re-presenting the found image as it stands, Prince has instigated a strategy of erasure and alteration to transform the meaning and message of his subject. Perhaps the most significant addition to the picture is the surgical mask that is used to obliterate the identity of all Prince's nurses. The obscuring mask lends the sultry nurse an air of mystery and potential sadism. But it also serves to compound her status as a stereotype, wiping out what little individualized features she has to represent a generic feminine ideal. By gagging his heroines in this way, Prince presents us with a provocative image that appears to reinforce the cultural fixation with women as enigmatic and alluring, both innocent and vamp. The Taming of Nurse Conway can be seen as a continuation of the artist's interest in the ambiguous ways society has chosen to portray women and how women have seemed to want to portray themselves - including raunchy biker chicks, product models, Playboy jokes, and sexy girls-next-door. The fantasy nurse sits more than comfortably within these sub-groups as they all behave as images of titillation. 'I think a lot of the imagery I do create is sexual,' Prince has stated, 'and I hope it does turn people on (quoted in R. Kennedy, 'Two Artists United by Devotion to Women', The New York Times, 22 December 2008, on www.nytimes.com).
Over the past three decades, Prince has created works of art that appropriate distinctive elements of American mass culture, often deconstructing and celebrating them simultaneously. In the Nurse paintings, he has identified the figure of the sensual caregiver as a longstanding embodiment of our culture's overactive imaginations and a familiar object of erotic imaginings. By harnessing this pervasive character type of countless fictions, Prince is not only scrutinizing one of society's most deeply ingrained stereotypes, but also highlighting his longstanding fascination with image constructs and their power.