Untitled (couple)

Richard Prince

1976 · Mixed media on paper · Photographs

In the mid-1970s, Prince was an aspiring painter who earned his living at Time-Life clipping articles from magazines for staff writers. What was left at the end of the day were the ads: gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models that provoked in the artist an uneasy mix of fascination and repulsion, disgust and envy. By 1977, Prince had begun rephotographing these advertisements in order to, as he put it, "turn the lie back on itself." Acting as art director, artist, and viewer, he imagined his purloined images as stills from a movie in his head. He developed a repertoire of strategies--blurring, cropping, enlarging, grouping--that undermined the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the image, revealing it to be a hallucination, a fiction of society's desires.

Artist

Richard Prince

Date

1976

Medium

Mixed media on paper

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel and Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2000