“Some people say the nurse paintings are all about desire—but isn’t that more to do with their proximity to life and death? Isn’t that why we find nurses sexy—because they embody this ultimate contradiction?”
Set against a flaming vermilion background, emblazoned with gestural strokes of yellow and gushing drips of white pigment, Richard Prince’s Man Crazy Nurse is a seminal example of the artist’s conceptual apogee in the Nurse paintings from 2002-08. Prince’s femme fatale protagonist explores and exploits the melodramatic pulp fiction stereotype, encapsulating the audacious subversion of authorship, identity, and authenticity at the heart of Prince’s practice. Executed in 2002-03, Man Crazy Nurse belongs to the artist’s original and acclaimed suite of Nurse paintings exhibited at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in the fall of 2003. The series marks a climax of the narrative arc of Prince’s conceptual program which begins with his iconic Cowboys in the 1980s, by which the artist contends with notions of originality through appropriation and witty interrogations of mythical cultural archetypes. Inspired by the cover art and titles of pulp fiction romance novellas from the 1950s-80s, which the artist collects avidly, the Nurse paintings deconstruct the trope of the seductive female nurse as a symbol of eroticism and objectification.
How Pulp Fiction Meets High Art: The Truth Behind Richard Prince’s 'Man Crazy Nurse'
Prince’s series offers a transgressive scrutiny of the Pop bombshell precedent popularized in Andy Warhol’s celebrities and Roy Lichtenstein’s comic heroines, probing the polarities of desire and fear, thwarting the author’s original narrative. Further testament to the import of the present work, following its inclusion at the seminal Barbara Gladstone Gallery exhibition, Man Crazy Nurse was featured in Prince’s mid-career survey, Spiritual America at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2007. Prince’s Man-Crazy Nurse emerges from a scorching red expanse; her starched-white uniform glowing against streaming yellow drips. The text “MAN-CRAZY NURSE” appears seared above the anonymous figure, whose facial features have been concealed by a surgical mask. In the creation of this work, Prince appropriated the cover art from one of romance novelist Peggy Gaddis’s fantasy tale, Man-Crazy Nurse. The original cover art features a sultry, red-lipped nurse in counterpoise, glancing over her shoulder at a suited man gaping in her direction, characteristic of a flourishing pulp fiction subgenre revolving around sexualized female nurses. Above the title, the introductory text reads: “Doctors and patients couldn’t resist this…”
Market Precedent: Richard Prince Nurses
In Prince’s rendition, the Man Crazy Nurse of Gaddis’ escapist novella takes a provocative and startling twist. Prince eliminates the male character from the scene: recontextualizing the nurse’s ostensibly seductive, enticing posture to one of aggression and even menace. Skeins of red pigment shroud her clipboard and red drips of pigment trinkle down her forehead evoking blood. Her face melts into a blur of pigment behind her mask, which afforded Prince a way of “making it all the same and getting rid of the personality.” (the artist quoted in: Glenn O’Brien, “Richard Prince,” Interview Magazine, December 2008 - January 2009, p. 201) Simultaneously seductive and sinister, the Nurse paintings create a compelling dichotomy that blurs the line between innocence and vice, desire and fear.
“Mr. Prince mines the ways that society has portrayed women and how women have seemed to want to be portrayed. His obsessions… toy... ambiguously and provocatively with sexism, exploitation and the conventions of pornography.”
Predicated on a conceptual investigation of authorship and identity, Prince’s celebrated and radical practice subverts conventions of originality through a postmodern lens. Prince maintains an extensive professional collection of mid-century dime store novellas as well as illustrator’s boards of the original cover art designs. To create the Nurse paintings, the artist first scanned, enlarged and transferred the original book cover onto the surface of his canvas using an inkjet printer – the hallmark vestige of his earlier oeuvre, first developed in the 1970s as part of the Pictures Generation. He then layered veils of diaphanous acrylic paint atop this inkjet ground, creating a smoldering scene of reds, yellows and whites, which nearly completely conceals the original composition. Prince’s composition invokes Willem de Kooning’s heralded Women of the 1950s, conjuring the furious gesture and battle between eroticism and intimidation that defines the series and paying homage to the vanguard New York School artists who revolutionized painting concurrently with the rise of pulp fiction.
Prince’s Nurse Paintings of the early 2000s operate as the conceptual counterpart of his iconic early Cowboys. In this acclaimed series anchored by the damsel cliché, Prince replaces the hypermasculine, quixotic cowboy culled from Marlboro advertisements with the sexualized heroine of escapist romance novels. In both cases, Prince exploits and deconstructs an anonymous cultural ideal which permeates the cultural psyche. He appropriates real advertisements and consumer goods, but also, more cleverly, pilfers an invented cultural ideal. In Man-Crazy Nurse, Prince’s ingenious manipulation of appropriated imagery prompts a reconsideration of mythologized gender roles, but also the foundations of authorship and originality in the postmodern era. Prince’s imitable oeuvre–including his Nurses, Cowboys, and Jokes–interrogates the very nature of authorship and definitions of art altogether. Foiling narrative constructs and authorial agency, Prince posits collective authorship, or rather collective claim, and the demise of our conception of the artist. Tantalizing and shocking, sexual and fearsome, copied and invented, Man-Crazy Nurse is a superlative and early example from Prince’s most celebrated series.
