Richard Prince

Gladstone Gallery, New York
Gagosian Gallery, London
Private Collection (acquired from the above)
Christie's, London, June 30, 2015, Lot 50
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Moscow, Gagosian Gallery at Barviha Luxury Village, Insight?, October 2007, p. 55, illustrated in color and p. 83 (text)

The image of cowboy is so familiar in American iconology that it has to become almost invisible through its normality. And yet the cowboy is also the most sacred and masklike of cultural figures. In both a geographical and cultural sense, a cowboy is an image of endurance itself, a stereotypical symbol of American cinema.” (Rosetta Brooks in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (and travelling), Richard Prince, 1992, p. 95)

Untitled (Cowboy) undeniably belongs among the most romantic and cinematic works from Richard Prince's emblematic Cowboy series. Executed in 2001, this monumentally scaled photograph is an exceptionally dazzling example from arguably the artist's most famous body of work; indeed, no other figure and theme has captured Prince’s attention so vividly for the entirety of his forty-year career. By re-appropriating images from Marlboro advertisements and presenting them unbranded, blown-up to spectacularly monumental scale, Prince not only challenges the nature of photography and its authorship but more importantly deconstructs and interrogates romanticized images that shape American identity. Against a resplendent Southwestern sunset, set ablaze in spectacular shades of purple, amber, and magenta, the blurred silhouettes of cowboys gather upon a raised tableau, the incendiary hues of the setting sun casting their shadowy forms—and the stark inauthenticity of their universal accepted mythology—into  sharp, cinematic relief.

Along with his contemporaries from the Pictures Generation of the 70s and 80s, Prince belonged to a disillusioned group of young American artists who rose to prominence at a time when their predecessors had already stripped the art-making process from its representational, durational and even material constraints. In belonging to an image-saturated, highly commercialized culture, Prince and his contemporaries directly took on the visual vernacular that characterized their generation. In 1974, while working as an office support and clipping editorials for the staff-writers of Time-Life magazine, the artist was intrigued by the remarkable visual potency of the leftover advertisements scattered upon the newsroom floor. Fascinated, the artist began re-photographing the found advertisements through his own inquisitorial lens, removing tag lines and slogans so only the aesthetic splendor of these images, many of which were universally familiar within the American visual lexicon, remained. Remarking upon the draw of pre-existing imagery, Prince reveals that he “never thought of making anything new”; as he has stated, “I am very much against making anything new in a modernist approach.” (the artist in conversation with Noemi Smolik in Carl Haenlein, ed., Richard Prince, Photographs, 1977-1993, Hannover, 1994, p. 32) Vacillating between a Warholian fascination with pop-culture and a wry critique of Pop Art’s own inherent hypocrisy, Prince forged a unique practice of appropriation, transformation, and revitalization that is perhaps best exemplified in his Cowboy series. As outlined by Nancy Spector, “Prince’s appropriations of existing photographs are never merely copies of the already available. Instead, they extract a kind of photographic unconscious from the image, bringing to the fore suppressed truths about its meaning and its making.” (Nancy Spector, “Nowhere Man” in Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, 2007, p. 26)

 As the quintessential symbol of American masculinity, the rugged, handsome and paradigmatic icon of the cowboy is the ultimate example of an industry-fabricated cultural construct, mythologized and distanced from his true historical origin; as such, the universality of the cowboy offered the ideal vehicle for marketing Marlboro’s filtered cigarettes to an audience of both men and women in the 1980s. At once synonymous with freedom, lonesome independence and chivalry, the celebrated masculine performances by Clint Eastwood and John Wayne in Hollywood westerns established a spectacular narrative of glorious strife and triumph for the cowboy, transforming him into a signifier for both male and female desire. As described by Rosetta Brooks in the catalogue for the seminal 1992 retrospective of the artist’s work, “The image of cowboy is so familiar in American iconology that it has to become almost invisible through its normality. And yet the cowboy is also the most sacred and masklike of cultural figures. In both a geographical and cultural sense, a cowboy is an image of endurance itself, a stereotypical symbol of American cinema.” (Rosetta Brooks in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (and travelling), Richard Prince, 1992, p. 95) That same mythic familiarity that rendered the cowboy the ideal guise for the “Marlboro Man” offered Prince an immensely potent image upon which to found his iconic series. Re-envisioned by Prince, the cowboy is unveiled as both powerfully seductive and profoundly inauthentic, as the viewer is asked to examine his or her own reaction towards a widely proliferated visual trope. Simultaneously, cinematically poised within the large rectangular and horizontal format, the exquisite beauty of the blazing sunset offers an independent aesthetic value, daring the viewer to deny the dazzling vibrancy or arresting compositional balance of the present work. Gazing down upon the viewer from their lofty crest, Prince’s anonymous cowboys embody the very essence of advertising: despite their unveiling as a universally accepted social trope, we are inevitably seduced by the seeming simplicity and sheer, magnificent splendor of the image.