Richard Prince

Sadie Coles, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of light wear and handling to the bottom edge of the canvas. There are a few areas where the collaged photographic paper is slightly lifting at the edges. Unframed.
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At a first glance, Richard Prince's Untitled (Kate Moss & Sid Vicious) appears abstract. Stretching one hundred and twenty inches across, the painterly expanse of grisaille confronts the viewer on an environmental scale that resembles the iconic works of Jackson Pollock. Two layers of content disrupt this effect. The first puncture to the illusion of abstraction is the stenciled collection of letters that form four horizontal lines across the expanse, revealing that this is in fact one of Prince's famous Joke paintings. Upon closer inspection, beneath the impastoed layer of paint of Untitled (Kate Moss & Sid Vicious), it becomes clear that the entire background is comprised of images of the supermodel Kate Moss either topless or wearing a bikini top and Sid Vicious looking every bit worthy of his infamous reputation as the enfant terrible of the seventies. In combining the joke paintings with appropriation of photographs, one finds the two most important series of Prince’s practice. Prince’s Joke Painting series began in the late 1980s, when he wrote his first handwritten joke on a piece of paper and hung it up, realizing that he would have been envious if another artist had beaten him to it. His early works, all handwritten, grew into more substantial pieces when he began to incorporate the jokes with bold text, color, and images, often without any connection one to the other. Prince’s jokes, which tend to meld seeming banality with satire, often poke fun at family, religion, and his relationships with women. While Prince is most recognized for his joke paintings, he rose to prominence with his scandalous re-photographing of images and advertisements found in glossy fashion magazines and adult zines. Richard Prince culls his subject matter from the detritus of America media, finding inspiration and imagery in the blue-collar, consumer driven and image hungry products of our local television and pop-culture publications. Cars, women, film, pulp fiction, food advertisements, fashion and sex are all victims of Prince’s brilliant visual piracy. His works brim with contradictions: intensely ironic but still sincere, mimetic but surprisingly original and consistently both banal and shocking. The artist toys with ideas of authorship and originality by re-contextualizing his visual icons and idioms, in this case the art historical importance of Pollock, the desirability of Kate Moss, and the punk energy of Sid Vicious suffused into one impressive painting. 

The viewer might be left wondering what the connection is between the subject and its background. Perhaps there exists a fabulously esoteric answer to this riddle. Or, perhaps, Prince looks to make a joke out of the viewer’s confusion.  The reference to Pollock and Vicious is an important one to stress. Prince was drawn to the story of Pollock as an isolated, anti-social artist who met his untimely death far too young. Sid Vicious is another example of such a persona, famously quipping, "I'll probably die by the time I reach 25. But I'll have lived the way I wanted to." In Kate Moss, Prince finds the perfect crystallization of the waif-like grunge fashion of the nineties in all of its sexual inhibition. Sid Vicious passed away in New York just as Prince was rising as a star in the contemporary art world. In Vicious, Prince found the perfect opposite to the revered anti-hero of Pollock. Whereas one is widely praised as the most important American painter the other is seen as an infamous rabble-rouser more trouble than he was worth. Pollock’s untimely death led to a beatification of sorts and was greeted with great remorse. Such sympathy and remorse helped propel his reputation to the hallowed moniker of master artist and symbol of American abstraction. Vicious’ untimely death was greeted with a sense of inevitability and was shrouded in controversy. There was no sympathy for Vicious nor was there any redemption. The mirroring of their lives and careers in terms of fame and tragedy allows Prince to use Sid Vicious as a means of undermining the polished image of Pollock art history had created after his death in order to show the grit and roughness of the reality. Prince in all of his work seeks to peel back the glossy layer of our culture and searches for the decrepit, taboo, and unsavory and paints both the high culture of fine art and the low culture of mass media with the same tainted brush. It is this realism of sorts that gives all of his work and, in particular, a piece such as Untitled (Kate Moss & Sid Vicious) so poignantly visceral. Prince is the ultimate excavator of the underbelly of our culture.

Jasper Johns, Numbers in Color, 1958-59
Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY 
Art © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950
Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
© 2015 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York