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“With the cowboy ads, I could do something that felt almost like a still from a film. And I really loved the idea of suspension of disbelief when you went to the movies.” – Richard Prince

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.

Prince is a keen sorter of visual messages, “The more I saw commonalities, the more I could believe in it.” Of course, he knew the ad image was artifice. The Philip Morris production team made highly wrought objects. “The things about those ads was that it wasn’t a cowboy you were seeing. It was a model. But the model might be a real cowboy, acting like a cowboy. It was making itself up.” Engineering believability caught hold of Prince.

In the beginning, he would photograph adverts at a tight crop to avoid text, enlarging his images into grainy close-ups. In the 1980s, Prince debuted his seminal cowboy series. Gallery walls were plastered with photos created by others for the Marlboro campaign, and taken by him. Ever since, Prince earned a well-publicized outlaw aesthetic. His shoot-first-ask-questions-later method to borrowing popular imagery has at times positioned him within sticky copyright litigation. Prince removed all text reference, leaving the viewer with a decontextualized image. The amplified image denuded of context appears tauntingly archetypal. This working method of appropriation and re-presentation of ubiquitous mass media imagery brought him into the fold of the Pictures Generation, alongside artists like Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine who explored ways that generic images connote meaning. Prince decoded commercial photography, revealing the relied-upon clichés.

While his appropriation has courted debates of legality, culture has always been a subject of artistic re-presentation. “With the cowboy ads, I could do something that felt almost like a still from a film. And I really loved the idea of suspension of disbelief when you went to the movies.” Prince was attuned to the reality that the shot was staged, the cowboy an actor, and that the viewer often does not to view it as such. However, art prompts criticality. The cowboy campaign channeling the mythic West and mythic man has shaped the American psyche. The image has catalyzed projection into a fantasy; but in the arena of art, the notional cowboy is a reflection unto society.

Enhanced studio techniques allowed him to increase the scale and intensity of the final picture. He was able to transpose his subjects into the landscape, where before he had tightly focused on their horse-backed forms. Set in the vast American frontier, the cinematic works recall the Romantic tradition in painting. In 2018, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibited Prince’s most recent continuation of the cowboy motif. The show evidenced an increasingly sophisticated capture of cowboy imagery. For his 2015–16 Untitled (cowboy) photographs, Prince revisited old copies of TIME. He re-photographed the tear-sheets for what they are: tear-sheets. To emphasize a source, he included a column of Scotch tape binding two halves of the image ripped from a spread. Prince adeptly used the medium as a means to an end: exposing the image as doubly “taken” and composed.

Richard Prince, “Untitled (cowboy)”, 2016, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Richard Prince, “Untitled (cowboy)”, 2016, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Richard Prince, “Untitled (cowboy)”, 1989
LIFE Magazine, 22 August 1949 with cowboy C. H. Long © Photo: Leonard McCombe

RICHARD PRINCE AT LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART

Richard Prince, “Untitled (cowboy)”, 2016, 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.”

MORE INFORMATION

“The things about those ads was that it wasn’t a cowboy you were seeing. It was a model. But the model might be a real cowboy, acting like a cowboy. It was making itself up.” – Richard Prince

Top Results at Auction

“Runaway Nurse” (2005-2006), inkjet and acrylic on canvas, 110 ¼ x 66 in. Sold at Christie’s New York: 10 May 2016 for $9,685,000

“Nurse of Greenmeadow” (2005-2006), inkjet and acrylic on canvas, 110 ¼ x 66 in. Sold at Christie’s New York: 11 May 2014 for $8,565,000

“Overseas. Nurse” (2002), ink jet print and acrylic on canvas, 93 by 56in. Sold at Sotheby’s London: 01 July 2008 for $ 8,452,000

Comparable Works Sold at Auction

“Untitled (Cowboy)” (1997), Ektacolor photograph, artist proof, 47 3/4 by 77 in. Sold at Sotheby’s New York: 10 May 2016 for $3,525,000

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

“Untitled (Cowboy)” (1997), Ektacolor photograph, numbered 1/2, 49 1/8 by 76 in. Sold at Sotheby’s New York: 17 November 2019 for $1,452,500

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

“Untitled (Cowboy)” (1999), Ektacolor photograph, numbered 1/2, 49 1/2 by 79 1/2 in. Sold at Sotheby’s New York: 7 March 2018 for $1,429,166

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.

“Untitled (Cowboy)” (2012), Inkjet and acrylic on canvas, 73 1/2 by 48 1/4 in. Sold at Sotheby’s New York: 17 May 2019 for $2,780,000

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), acrylic on canvas, 90½ x 50½ in. Sold at Christie’s New York: 12 November 2008 for $1,482,500

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.

“Untitled (Cowboy)” (2012), inkjet and acrylic on canvas, 67 1/8 by 40 1/4 in. Sold at Sotheby’s New York: 18 November 2016 for $1,452,500

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

“Untitled (Cowboy)” (1989), chromogenic print, 50 x 70 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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

“Untitled (Cowboy)” (2016), Los Angeles County Museum of Art

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

“Untitled (Cowboy)” (1986), chromogenic print, edition number 2 of 2, 26 1/2 x 39 1/2 in., The Art Institute of Chicago

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.

“Untitled (Cowboy)” (1991-1992), chromogenic print, 49 1/4 x 70 5/8 in., The San Francisco Museum of Modern 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.

Image Gallery

Additional Resources

WATCH: An enlightening interview with Richard Prince hosted by the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

READ: A 1988 Magazine interview with Richard Prince in BOMB Magazine

VISIT: The 2009 exhibition, “Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York prominently featured Richard Prince.