RICHARD PRINCE | Untitled (Cowboy)

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2003

Carrboro, Partobject Gallery, Richard Prince: Princeville-1999 N.C. Flood Disaster Benefit, August - September 2000

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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“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 cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (and travelling), Richard Prince, 1992, p. 95.

 

Utterly cinematic in both composition and scale, the present work belongs to Richard Prince’s Cowboy series, a body of work that today is perhaps the most well-known and critically acclaimed of the artist’s career. In the early 1980s Prince began re-photographing Marlboro cigarette adverts. Big-budget and Hollywood inspired, this utterly pervasive and wildly successful ad campaign ran from 1954 until its demise in the early 1980s – a demise prompted by the brand’s controversial link to lung cancer. Significantly, this was the very moment at which Prince began borrowing Marlboro’s adverts for the sake of his art.

In Untitled (Cowboy) the quintessential Marlboro man, astride his horse, leaps heroically across an icy blue stream at dusk or early morning. The image is unassailably Romantic and operates within a largely invented code of masculine idealism and pioneering Americanism that dates back to the Nineteenth Century. Indeed, where the American cowboy’s true historical origins are culturally marginal, rural, and predominantly Mexican, the western expansion of English speaking traders and settlers gave way to a blurring of cultural traditions. During the late Nineteenth Century, the expansion of the cattle industry and boom in cross-country cattle drives engendered a hyper-macho, and predominantly white, cowboy culture – a culture seized upon by politics and popular culture. Popularised in American movies, television, and proliferated by the mass media, a John Wayne image of the gunslinging lone-ranger became synonymous with the American Dream. All at once the cowboy stood for independence, freedom and authenticity and became ingrained in the collective consciousness of the US. Its power as a marketing tool was quickly realised by advertising agent Leo Burnett for his Marlboro advertising campaign; with the aim of marketing Marlboro cigarettes to men, Burnett dubbed the landscape of the American West ‘Marlboro Country’ and its macho inhabitants ‘Marlboro Men’. Catering to a predominantly male audience that had long lost touch with the origins of rural America, Marlboro’s big-budget ads utilised the cowboy and its American frontier mythology to appeal to male vanity.

By removing the commercial slogans and logos from Marlboro ads, Prince at once celebrates the artistry and slick production values of these images whilst also underlining the visual force of consumer culture and the constructed nature of cultural mores. As outlined by Guggenheim curator 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, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, 2007, p. 26).

Prince would repeatedly return to the iconic cowboy motif over the next four decades and by the late 1990s he had improved his technique; this allowed him to create larger works of heightened visual impact and increased dramatic effect, such as Untitled (Cowboy). While Prince’s appropriation of, and fascination with, advertising recalls the practice of artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist, the early cowboys disposed of the intermediary fine-art practice of painting on canvas. Instead, and much closer to Duchampian precedent, Prince’s cowboys were directly borrowed carbon copies. As part of the Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 80s, Prince forged a career that confronted issues of authenticity like no other artist before him. In lifting images and re-contextualising them as Richard Prince artworks, he examined pre-existing constructs of artistic creation whilst also unpicking the culturally loaded and constructed nature of mass media images. Recognising the complex language of power at work in readymade images, Prince scrutinises the constructed cultural values at stake in the visual make-up of America.