RICHARD PRINCE | The Housewife and the Grocer

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans

Christie’s, London, 25 May 1995, Lot 166

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2004

Boston, The Institute of Contemporary Art and Museum of Fine Arts; Dusseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen; Bremen, Kunsthalle Bremen; and Stuttgart, Württembergischer Kunstverein, The Binational, September 1988 - June 1989, p. 166, no. 62, illustrated in colour New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Richard Prince, April - July 1992, p. 190 (text)

Los Angeles, Regen Projects, Richard Prince: Women, February - March 2004, n.p., no. 18, illustrated in colour

New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, September 2007 - June 2008

New York, Skarstedt Gallery, Richard Prince, Martin Kippenberger, Mike Kelley, January - February 2009

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the tonality of the green is paler and the orange is brighter in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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The Housewife and the Grocer is a prominent example of Richard Prince’s seminal series of monochrome Joke Paintings executed between 1987 and 1989. In this pioneering group of works, Prince fused the crass content of low-brow cartoon humour with the high-minded aesthetic of monochrome painting to create individual vignettes of arresting conceptual impact. Amongst this concise group, the present work should be considered exceptional for its exhibition history, having been selected as an exemplar of the series for Prince’s major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Emerging amongst the appropriation artists of the 1980s, Prince stood out owing to the distinctive coolness of his work. While many of the re-photographers of his generation were inspired by postmodern theories on authenticity and originality, Prince’s work alternatively reflected a decidedly American cultural influence through his fascination with cowboys, bikers, cars, and lowbrow American humour. After his iconic series of Untitled (Cowboy) photographs of the early 1980s, in which Prince explored his signature conceptual strategy of appropriating imagery from advertising whilst referring to archetypes of the American dream, he became intrigued by the incorporation of jokes into his work. Like the found sources used for his photographs, the artist appropriated the jokes from cartoon-strips that he initially turned into hand-drawn copies on paper. Prince explained: “artists were casting sculptures in bronze, making huge paintings, talking about prices and clothes and cars and spending vast amounts of money. So I wrote jokes on little pieces of paper and sold them for $10 each” (Richard Prince cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, 2007, p. 37).

Following the initial hand-written jokes and subsequent works in which cartoon images were silkscreened onto canvas, Prince soon embarked on a more radical approach that banished any form of illustration. Daring his viewers to take a lewd one-liner for a serious work of art, Prince began cataloguing found-jokes in 1985, stripping them down to their bare linguistic essentials. Shortly afterwards, these typed out gags were turned into the iconic series of monochrome Jokes to which the present work belongs. Against backgrounds of flat strident colour, Prince silkscreened his san-serif jokes in contrasting hues. By presenting the very antithesis of the Neo-Expressionist style of painting that had come to dominate the late-1980s artistic milieu, the monochrome Jokes are seditious and rebellious. Instead of opting for the expressive, gestural application of paint that was so lauded in contemporaneous taste, Prince silkscreened his jokes onto immaculate painted surfaces to create works that were entirely devoid of artistic gesture. However, this is not to say that he did not consider them paintings. As he playfully remarked: “the ‘joke’ paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can’t speak English” (Richard Prince cited in: Exh. Cat., Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Richard Prince: Canaries in the Coal Mine, 2006, p. 124).

The Housewife and The Grocer confronts the viewer with a strangely puzzling juxtaposition of minimalist composition and silkscreened words. Although this can be read as a reference to postmodern linguistic theory, the work also points to two quintessentially American characteristics: hard-edge abstraction and popular humour. Cleverly subverting the clean and serious vernacular of abstract painting, the Jokes' amalgamation of low and high culture characterises Prince’s most important work. Wittingly parodying gags from the popular speech, the artist found a way of incorporating a universal human condition – humour – into a deeply serious and resolutely intellectual artistic statement.