Richard Prince

Richard Prince (born 1949) is an American painter and photographer.

Richard Prince was born on the 6th of August 1949, in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone, now part of the Republic of Panama.

The 1956 Time magazine article dubbing Pollock "Jack the Dripper" made the thought of pursuing art as career possible.

After finishing high school in 1967, Prince set off for Europe at age 18.

He returned home and attended Nasson College in Maine, which he described as without grades or structure.

From Maine he moved to Braintree, Massachusetts, and for a brief time lived in Provincetown.

Ultimately he was drawn to New York City.

In the mid-1970s, Prince made drawings and painterly collages that he has since disowned.

Appropriation art became popular in the late 1970s.

In 1973, he moved to New York and joined publishing company Time Inc. His job at the Time Inc. library involved providing the company's various magazines with tear sheets of articles.

Prince was first interested in the art of the American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock.

"I was very attracted to the idea of someone who was by themselves, fairly antisocial, kind of a loner, someone who was noncollaborative."

Prince grew up during the height of Pollock's career, making his work accessible.

Starting in 1977, Prince photographed four photographs which previously appeared in The New York Times.

Prince's first solo exhibition took place in June 1980 during a residency at the CEPA gallery in Buffalo, New York.

His short book Menthol Wars was published as part of the residency.

Other appropriation artists such as, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Vikky Alexander, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Mike Bidlo also became prominent in the East Village in the 1980s.

In 1981 Prince had his first West Coast solo exhibition at Jancar Kuhlenschmidt Gallery in Los Angeles.

This process of rephotographing continued into 1983, when his work Spiritual America featured Garry Gross's photo of Brooke Shields at the age of ten, standing in a bathtub, as an allusion to precocious sexuality and to the Alfred Stieglitz photograph by the same name.

In 1985, he spent four months making art in a rented house in Venice, Los Angeles.

His Jokes series (beginning 1986) concerns the sexual fantasies and sexual frustrations of white, middle-class America, using stand-up comedy and burlesque humor.

After living in New York City for 25 years, Prince moved to upstate New York.

During an interview in 2000 with Julie L. Belcove, he responded to the question of why his parents were in the Zone, by saying "they worked for the government."

When asked further if his father was involved in the military, Prince responded, "No, he just worked for the government."

The Wall Street Journal later reported that Prince's parents worked for the Office of Strategic Services in the Panama Canal before he was born.

Prince later lived in the New England city of Braintree, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, and Provincetown on Cape Cod.

His mini-museum, Second House, purchased by the Guggenheim Museum, was struck by lightning and burned down shortly after the museum purchased the House (which Prince had created for himself), having only stood for six years, from 2001 to 2007.

In June 2021, the painting Runaway Nurse from 2005 to 2006 fetched a record-breaking 93,986,000 HKD (US$12,121,000) at Sotheby's in Hong Kong.

Prince now lives and works in New York City.

His image, Untitled (Cowboy), a photographic reproduction of a photograph by Sam Abell and appropriated from a cigarette advertisement, was the first rephotograph to be sold for more than $1 million at auction at Christie's New York in 2005.

He is regarded as "one of the most revered artists of his generation" according to The New York Times.

Describing his career and methodology in a 2005 New York magazine interview, Prince said, "It's about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things."

Re-photography uses appropriation as its own focus: artists pull from the works of others and the worlds they depict to create their own work.

In late 2007, Prince had a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a comprehensive show hung in chronological order along the upward spiraling walls.

The show continued onto the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Maria Morris Hamburg, the curator of photography at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, asserted, "He is absolutely essential to what's going on today, he figured out before anyone else—and in a very precocious manner—how thoroughly pervasive the media is. It's not just an aspect of our lives, but the dominant aspect of our lives."

Prince has built up a large collection of Beat books and papers.

Prince owns several copies of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, including one inscribed to Kerouac's mother, one famously read on The Steve Allen Show, the original proof copy of the book and an original galley, as well as the copy owned by Neal Cassady (the Dean Moriarty character in the book), with Cassady's signature and marginal notes.

Prince has said that his attraction to New York was instigated by the famous photograph of Franz Kline gazing out the window of his 14th Street studio.

Prince described the picture as "a man content to be alone, pursuing the outside world from the sanctum of his studio."