History
The cowboy, epitome of the American rugged individualist, has been a career-long fascination for Richard Prince and inspired the works that made him famous. In the mid-1970s, Prince was employed in the Time-Life tear sheet department, where it was his job to strip the text from magazines. After he collated hard copy editorial material for the writers, he was left with a tattered group of glossy adverts. Prince collected the images, sorted them, and sought patterns between. Soon enough he had files full of Salem, Newport, Marlboro ads.
Life magazine chose Texas cowboy Clarence Hailey Long for the cover in 1949, which publicized Leonard McCombe’s photo-essay on ranching in the American West. The weather-worn face staring past readers with a cigarette fixed between his lips caused a sensation. Long and friends became standard-bearers of male authenticity. Not long after, in 1954, adman Leo Burnett dreamed up the Marlboro Man ad campaign. For four decades, the cowboy writ large convinced the country that they too could be manly as he, if only they smoked his brand cigarette. Ads stirred belief, and nostalgia. Intentionally, the campaign ran during war-torn decades steeped in pessimism about the future. The cowboy was the heroic spirit of a vanishing era.
MoreRICHARD PRINCE AT LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented an exhibition of Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy) series in 2017-2018. The show featured two of Prince’s photographic series from the 2010s, including works from 2016 comparable to our piece. Highlighting the importance of this series to Prince’s ongoing examination of ownership and innovation, LACMA explored the artist’s cowboy series of re-photographed advertisements: “Extending his interrogation of this particular American protagonist into the era of Instagram, Prince demonstrates that the stakes around originality, appropriation, and truth in advertising are as high as ever.”
Top Results at Auction



Comparable Works Sold at Auction

This stunning multiple cowboy image from 1997 is among the finest examples of Richard Prince’s Cowboy series.

Comparable Scale to Untitled (Cowboy) (2012), both images show the Cowboy figure set against a seemingly endless Western landscape.

Like the work available at Heather James, this Cowboy is also from an edition of 2 works. Many of the Cowboy images of this scale are created in an edition of 2.

Like Untitled (Cowboy) (2016), this 2012 work simultaneously explores the theme of American individualism and consumer culture through the appropriation of the Marlboro cowboy character.

Untitled (Cowboy) (1999) shares a similar scale to the work currently available at Heather James Fine Art. These large format works reflect the American Western landscape’s vastness and the large characters that have lived there.

The horse and horseback travel are synonymous with the American West and its lore. Both Untitled (Cowboy) (2012) and Untitled (Cowboy) (2016) feature the horse as a symbol of the mythology of the “Wild West.”
Art in Museum Collections

Perhaps Richard Prince’s most iconic “Cowboy”, the 1989 work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a cornerstone of their Contemporary Art collection

Featured in the 2018 LACMA exhibition, this work is now included in the Museum’s permanent collection.

The Richard Prince at the Art Institute Chicago shares both the same medium and edition size as the piece currently offered at Heather James Fine Art.

Acquired at the time of the work’s creation by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Untitled (Cowboy) shares the same subject as the work available at Heather James Fine Art.