Richard Prince

Gagosian Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Exhibition Catalogue, Hannover, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Richard Prince: Photographien/Photographs 1977-1993, 1994, no. 42, illustration of another example in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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“The Cowboy series is the work with which Prince is most usually associated. Taken from the popular Marlboro cigarette advertising campaign, a typical art work from the series might be an image of one or more cowboys – the cowboys’ faces partially obscured by a Stetson – riding on horseback in a desert or prairie setting.”

Rosetta Brooks, ‘Spiritual America: No Holds Bared’, Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Richard Prince, 1992-3, p. 95.


Belonging to the most immediately recognisable and iconic series by Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboys) magnificently embodies the artist’s unflinching scrutiny of the American dream. Taken directly from the glamorous Marlboro cigarette adverts first popularised in the 1950s under the brand direction of Philip Morris, Prince isolates, crops and re-frames these glossy and cinematographic productions, unravelling and revealing the illusion of picturesque romanticism and exaggerated masculinity that lies at the heart of the popular American psyche.

The Cowboy is the quintessentially American symbol. At once representing freedom, lonesome independence and chivalry, this handsome and rugged ideal of masculinity embodies an utterly mythical construct. Elevated from his original Hispanic roots and position as a lowly ranch-hand, the imagination of Hollywood and hyped-up masculine performances by Clint Eastwood and John Wayne transformed the Cowboy into a signifier for both male and female desire. Indeed, it was the Cowboy’s utter universality that made him the perfect vehicle for marketing Marlboro’s filtered cigarettes, not only to women but also to men. Nancy Spector has observed: “He is instantly recognisable in his requisite dress of denim, leather chaps, boots, spurs, and Stetson hat. Both a role model and sex symbol, the cowboy appeals to men and women alike. His hyped, exaggerated masculinity has also made him a gay icon, a fact no doubt embraced by Philip Morris, whose desired demographic knows no bounds: a smoker is a smoker, regardless of gender, age, race, or sexual orientation” (Nancy Spector, 'Nowhere Man', Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Richard Prince, 2007, p. 34). Representing a host for incongruent and somewhat contradictory desires – an iconography contemporaneously stage-managed by ‘Cowboy-President’ Ronald Reagan’s government – Richard Prince’s appropriation of the ‘Marlboro Man’ scrutinises these multiple layers of signification.

By removing the text, zooming-in and re-photographing these mass consumer images, Prince draws out the seductively epic and filmic quality as a means to implore the viewer to re-think an already accepted but utterly fabricated reality – to quote Spector – “a seamless simulation of an already simulated picture” (Ibid., p. 28). As Prince explains: “The pictures I went after, ‘stole’, were too good to be true. They were about wishful thinking, public pictures that happen to appear in the advertising sections of mass market magazines, pictures not associated with an author… it was their look I was interested in. I wanted to re-present the closest thing to the real thing” (The artist cited by: Rosetta Brooks, ‘Spiritual America: No Holds Bared’, Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, and travelling, Richard Prince, 1992-3, p. 85). In the act of appropriation, Prince’s spectacular reframing of the American Sublime teases out the underlying stereotypes, prejudices, desires and fears manipulated and woven into the fabric of popular iconography. Significantly however, Prince’s appropriation of the Marlboro ads re-presented America’s own mythic self-image at a time when its association with cigarettes had become highly controversial.

Prince first identified his subject at a crucial time when Marlboro’s use of the Cowboy had already been abandoned. Throughout the 1980s food, drugs, alcohol and sex had become targets for polemical self-reproach: an increasing climate of antismoking campaigns and health scares was underscored by media fear mongering surrounding the onset of the AIDS epidemic. At the heart of the antismoking controversy was the ‘Marlboro Man’: three of the men who appeared in the adverts were dying of lung cancer. Wanting to distance America’s ostensibly wholesome mythology from the taint of disease and death, Marlboro relinquished what is still considered today the most powerful advertising campaign in history. Re-photographed by Prince, the immensely potent image of the cowboy as a nostalgic, innocent and rugged projected cultural self-image is unveiled as profoundly inauthentic. Founded in the excesses and opulence of a decade devoted to materialism and illusion, Untitled (Cowboys) delivers a groundbreaking scrutiny of our culture’s increasing attraction to staged glossy spectacle over authentic lived experience.