richard prince

Richard Prince, (born 1949 in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone, now part of Republic of Panama) is an American painter and photographer. His works have often been the subject of debates within the art world. Trained as a figure painter, Prince began creating collages containing photographs in 1975. His image, ‘Untitled (Cowboy), a rephotograph constructed from cigarette advertisements, was the first ‘photograph’ to raise more than $1 million at auction when when it was sold at Christie's New York in 2005.

Starting in 1977, Prince created controversy by re-photographing four photographs which previously appeared in the New York Times. Within the art world, this became part of a major discussion concerning authorship and authenticity of photographic images, as well as photographic copyright issues. This continued into 1983, when his work Spiritual America featured a photo of Brooke Shields at the age of 10, standing in a bathtub, as an allusion to precocious sexuality and to the Alfred Stieglitz photograph by the same name. The display of this image led to lawsuits by Shields' mother and the original photographer, and led to further discussion within the art community, concerning the role of voyeurism within photography. His Jokes series (beginning 1986) concerns the sexual fantasies and sexual frustrations of middle-class America, using stand-up comedy and burlesque humour.

The nurse paintings

Nurse paintings is a series of paintings of nurses by Prince based on the covers of pulp romance novels.

Technique

Actual covers of books were scanned to create the foundation for the paintings—the titles and the images of the nurses. They are ink jet print on canvas with acrylic overlay and are fairly large in scale.

Richard Prince pioneered the technique of modern rephotography and this series is notable for the pioneering technique of the layering of digital and analogue media: the application of an analogue medium (acrylic) to a digitalized print (ink jet) of a digitalized image (scan) of an analogue print (book cover) of an analogue artwork (original art portrayed on the book cover).

Subjects

In the series of 19 paintings, the nurses all wear caps and their mouths are covered by surgical masks, although in some of the paintings the red lips bleed through the masks. The final presentations preserve the title and nurse image from each of the book covers, though all else is obscured.

Titles

(all works 2002 - 2003)

• A Nurse Involved, 72 x 45 inches
• Aloha Nurse, 58 x 36 inches
• Danger Nurse at Work, 93 x 56 inches
• Doctor's Nurse, 58 x 36 inches
• Dude Ranch Nurse, 80 x 52 inches
• Graduate Nurse, 89 x 52 inches
• Heartbreak Nurse, 54 x 64 inches
• Lake Resort Nurse
• New England Nurse
• Nurse Barclay's Dilemma, 70 x 48 inches
• Piney Woods Nurse
• Surfing Nurse #2, 78 1/4 x 91 inches
• Surgical Nurse, 58 x 36 inches

Bibliography

the beauty. Distributed Art Publishers. ISBN 0-9703422-1-7