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Lot Essay
‘With the Nurse paintings, I believe I started out just reading the paper. It just occurred to me that everyone needed a nurse. I collect books—basically I’m a bibliophile—and I had collected these nurse books. There’s a whole genre and I’d had them for years. I wanted to do something just white; […] But before I put them away, I made a mistake painting all this white—this is when I say I get lucky. After I had wiped off some of the painting, it looked like a mask on the nurse’s face and suddenly it was one of those moments. When I noticed that, I realized that was going to be the contribution to the image, to put a mask on these various nurse illustrations. It was a way of unifying and also talking about identity’ (R. Prince, quoted in N. Shukur, ‘Richard Prince,’ Russh at www.russhmagazine.com, accessed December, 2014).
‘Look at all the people today making things using sampled images, mashing up video clips and photographs in ways that feel incredibly common to us, no one does it like Richard. He changed art practice in the 20th century’ (N. Spector, quoted in K. Crow, ‘Artist Richard Prince’s Secret Retreat,’ WSJ Magazine, December 2014/January 2015, accessed via www.online.wsj.com, December 17, 2014).
Shrouded in a swathe of rich colour and mauves and gestural brushstrokes, the enigmatic figure of Richard Prince’s nurse belongs to the most celebrated series of paintings by one of the most important and influential figures in contemporary art. The artist’s Nurse paintings combine high-art, popular culture and contemporary events as he mashes together trashy 1950s romance fiction, tawdry horror films and the legacy of Abstract Expressionist painting into one extraordinary painting. In this rare, almost full-length portrait (most figures from this series are viewed from above the waist), Emergency Nurse possess a vulnerability, her diminutive figure almost subsumed by the painterly miasma that surrounds. As he has done so prodigiously since the late 1970s with borrowed imagery from popular media, Prince expands his investigation of authorship and authenticity in this ambitious series of paintings. He reloads this imagery, reiterating it with a new identity, a new fiction.
In Emergency Nurse, Prince’s heroine appears silhouetted against a painterly backdrop of soft and warm red, yellows, purples, green and earth tones. Comprised of a series of tumultuous brushstrokes, this setting evokes a landscape of sorts, a reading enhanced by the golden hues of pink, yellow, and orange that evoke a warm sunset at the end of a hot summer’s night. Moving down the canvas the mood changes dramatically, as the figure of the nurse looms into view. She is not the traditional Good Samaritan, the chaste care giver who puts the welfare of her patients before her own. Here, with frenzied daubs of red paint, the artist transforms her in an altogether more disturbing figure. With her white starched uniform, including a blue cloak draped over her shoulders, she is instantly recognizable as a nurse, yet her obvious state of distress conveys a disturbing sense of uneasiness that is a far cry from the romantic scenarios of the pulp fiction books from which Richard Prince takes his source material. In these books, the nurse is often a virtuous figure whose quest for true love is a perfect counterpoint to the day-to-day melodrama of hospital life. But in Emergency Nurse Prince has transformed her into a much darker and sinister figure whose bloodied uniform engenders fear instead of lust and desire. Emergency Nurse, combining the dramatic gestural surface, the brutal treatment of the paint and the subject, with what was formerly an idealized image designed specifically for its sexiness, here approaches these constructs from a new perspective that again exposes the strange mechanics of image presentation and interpretation in our 234 consumerist, media-drenched society. Prince has managed to create an image of a nurse that uncomfortably straddles the domains of sexual fantasy and horror. He has placed a mask on her face, he has covered the painting with expressive brushstrokes, and in doing so has made it appear all the more raw, all the more disturbing and powerfully subversive.
The origins of Prince’s Nurse paintings can be found in the global hysteria surrounding the SARS panic of 2002. The artist was struck by an image he saw in a newspaper which led to him thinking about the special role that nurses play in society. “I’ve always been very lucky when it comes to making art and finding subject matter,” Prince explains, “And the subject matter does come first and how it’s presented comes second. …With the Nurse paintings, I believe I started out just reading the paper. It just occurred to me that everyone needed a nurse. I collect books—basically I’m a bibliophile—and I had collected these nurse books. There’s a whole genre and I’d had them for years. I wanted to do something just white; […] But before I put them away, I made a mistake painting all this white— this is when I say I get lucky. After I had wiped off some of the painting, it looked like a mask on the nurse’s face and suddenly it was one of those moments. When I noticed that, I realized that was going to be the contribution to the image, to put a mask on these various nurse illustrations. It was a way of unifying and also talking about identity” (R. Prince, quoted in N. Shukur, ‘Richard Prince,’ Russh at www.russhmagazine.com, accessed December, 2014).
Prince drew on his own large collection of the particular variety of ‘pulp fiction’ as the starting point for his Nurse paintings. Appropriating both the original cover art and title, Prince manipulates the image to produce a different narrative, often transforming the more traditional view of a nurse as a caring and nurturing figure into something more far more sinister. As the allure of the sexy subject is levelled by the gravity of the Abstract Expressionist sensibility, she gains power as an image. Like De Kooning (an artist whom Prince greatly admires) and his iconic Woman paintings from the 1950s, Prince’s Emergency Nurse is goddess/ temptress, activated by the force and finesse of his abstract expressionist gesture. Pleasure and pain; desire and fear; beauty and gore polarize the composition and complicate any single interpretation.
Prince is one of the true pioneers of his generation. Building on the legacy of Andy Warhol, whose wry eye turned popular culture into high art, Prince took the next logical step and tried to disguise the hand of the artist completely. In his iconic Cowboy series from the 1970s, he took photographs of the iconic Marlboro tobacco advertisements which featured the physical embodiment of the American psyche, removed all commercial references and presented them as high art. Two decades later, with his Nurse paintings, he re-introduces the hand of the artist with the disrupted, painterly surface but the original genus of his ideas remain – disrupting the continuum of mass culture, something which turned him into one of the most influential artists of his generation. As Nancy Spector, Chief Curator at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum explains, “Look at all the people today making things using sampled images, mashing up video clips and photographs in ways that feel incredibly common to us, no one does it like Richard. He changed art practice in the 20th century” (N. Spector, quoted in K. Crow, ‘Artist Richard Prince’s Secret Retreat,’ WSJ Magazine, December 2014/January 2015, accessed via www.online.wsj.com, December 17, 2014).
‘Look at all the people today making things using sampled images, mashing up video clips and photographs in ways that feel incredibly common to us, no one does it like Richard. He changed art practice in the 20th century’ (N. Spector, quoted in K. Crow, ‘Artist Richard Prince’s Secret Retreat,’ WSJ Magazine, December 2014/January 2015, accessed via www.online.wsj.com, December 17, 2014).
Shrouded in a swathe of rich colour and mauves and gestural brushstrokes, the enigmatic figure of Richard Prince’s nurse belongs to the most celebrated series of paintings by one of the most important and influential figures in contemporary art. The artist’s Nurse paintings combine high-art, popular culture and contemporary events as he mashes together trashy 1950s romance fiction, tawdry horror films and the legacy of Abstract Expressionist painting into one extraordinary painting. In this rare, almost full-length portrait (most figures from this series are viewed from above the waist), Emergency Nurse possess a vulnerability, her diminutive figure almost subsumed by the painterly miasma that surrounds. As he has done so prodigiously since the late 1970s with borrowed imagery from popular media, Prince expands his investigation of authorship and authenticity in this ambitious series of paintings. He reloads this imagery, reiterating it with a new identity, a new fiction.
In Emergency Nurse, Prince’s heroine appears silhouetted against a painterly backdrop of soft and warm red, yellows, purples, green and earth tones. Comprised of a series of tumultuous brushstrokes, this setting evokes a landscape of sorts, a reading enhanced by the golden hues of pink, yellow, and orange that evoke a warm sunset at the end of a hot summer’s night. Moving down the canvas the mood changes dramatically, as the figure of the nurse looms into view. She is not the traditional Good Samaritan, the chaste care giver who puts the welfare of her patients before her own. Here, with frenzied daubs of red paint, the artist transforms her in an altogether more disturbing figure. With her white starched uniform, including a blue cloak draped over her shoulders, she is instantly recognizable as a nurse, yet her obvious state of distress conveys a disturbing sense of uneasiness that is a far cry from the romantic scenarios of the pulp fiction books from which Richard Prince takes his source material. In these books, the nurse is often a virtuous figure whose quest for true love is a perfect counterpoint to the day-to-day melodrama of hospital life. But in Emergency Nurse Prince has transformed her into a much darker and sinister figure whose bloodied uniform engenders fear instead of lust and desire. Emergency Nurse, combining the dramatic gestural surface, the brutal treatment of the paint and the subject, with what was formerly an idealized image designed specifically for its sexiness, here approaches these constructs from a new perspective that again exposes the strange mechanics of image presentation and interpretation in our 234 consumerist, media-drenched society. Prince has managed to create an image of a nurse that uncomfortably straddles the domains of sexual fantasy and horror. He has placed a mask on her face, he has covered the painting with expressive brushstrokes, and in doing so has made it appear all the more raw, all the more disturbing and powerfully subversive.
The origins of Prince’s Nurse paintings can be found in the global hysteria surrounding the SARS panic of 2002. The artist was struck by an image he saw in a newspaper which led to him thinking about the special role that nurses play in society. “I’ve always been very lucky when it comes to making art and finding subject matter,” Prince explains, “And the subject matter does come first and how it’s presented comes second. …With the Nurse paintings, I believe I started out just reading the paper. It just occurred to me that everyone needed a nurse. I collect books—basically I’m a bibliophile—and I had collected these nurse books. There’s a whole genre and I’d had them for years. I wanted to do something just white; […] But before I put them away, I made a mistake painting all this white— this is when I say I get lucky. After I had wiped off some of the painting, it looked like a mask on the nurse’s face and suddenly it was one of those moments. When I noticed that, I realized that was going to be the contribution to the image, to put a mask on these various nurse illustrations. It was a way of unifying and also talking about identity” (R. Prince, quoted in N. Shukur, ‘Richard Prince,’ Russh at www.russhmagazine.com, accessed December, 2014).
Prince drew on his own large collection of the particular variety of ‘pulp fiction’ as the starting point for his Nurse paintings. Appropriating both the original cover art and title, Prince manipulates the image to produce a different narrative, often transforming the more traditional view of a nurse as a caring and nurturing figure into something more far more sinister. As the allure of the sexy subject is levelled by the gravity of the Abstract Expressionist sensibility, she gains power as an image. Like De Kooning (an artist whom Prince greatly admires) and his iconic Woman paintings from the 1950s, Prince’s Emergency Nurse is goddess/ temptress, activated by the force and finesse of his abstract expressionist gesture. Pleasure and pain; desire and fear; beauty and gore polarize the composition and complicate any single interpretation.
Prince is one of the true pioneers of his generation. Building on the legacy of Andy Warhol, whose wry eye turned popular culture into high art, Prince took the next logical step and tried to disguise the hand of the artist completely. In his iconic Cowboy series from the 1970s, he took photographs of the iconic Marlboro tobacco advertisements which featured the physical embodiment of the American psyche, removed all commercial references and presented them as high art. Two decades later, with his Nurse paintings, he re-introduces the hand of the artist with the disrupted, painterly surface but the original genus of his ideas remain – disrupting the continuum of mass culture, something which turned him into one of the most influential artists of his generation. As Nancy Spector, Chief Curator at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum explains, “Look at all the people today making things using sampled images, mashing up video clips and photographs in ways that feel incredibly common to us, no one does it like Richard. He changed art practice in the 20th century” (N. Spector, quoted in K. Crow, ‘Artist Richard Prince’s Secret Retreat,’ WSJ Magazine, December 2014/January 2015, accessed via www.online.wsj.com, December 17, 2014).