Gagosian Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Beverly Hills, Gagosian Gallery, Richard Prince: Cowboys, February - April 2013

This work is in excellent condition overall. There is evidence of light wear and handling along the edges of the canvas. Under Ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Framed under Plexiglas.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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"The image of the cowboy is rendered immensely potent because it is through this most authentic image of American life that we can glimpse the deepest reaches of inauthenticity in a culture of death" (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Richard Prince, 1992, p. 96).

"I always liked cowboys on the screen. Big or small. TV or movies. On TV it was Paladin, Gunsmoke (Amanda Blake), The Rifleman, The✨ Lone Ranger, Zorro. My favorite cowboy movies were Shane, High Noon, 3:10 to Yuma, Rio Bravo, The Professionals, Johnny Guitar, The Wild Bunch...I can still watch Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven once a year. I can recite the whole last scene, after Clint comes to his senses and walks into 𒐪the saloon and asks, 'Who’s the asshole who owns this shithole?'" Richard Prince

"I'm always learning and curious about art. In fact when I'm not on the field or in the clubhouse, one of my favorite breaks is to visit an artist's studio. Richard Prince is o💖ne of my favorite artists. He is passionate and has the focus of an athlete. I think his cowboys are powerful symb🌊ols of the early American West." Alex Rodriguez              

The cowboy represents the most enduring motif of Richard Prince’s career. No other figure and theme has held his attention so consistently for the entirety of Prince’s forty-year career. The mythology of the cowboy and all of its symbolism has persisted in providing fertile ground from which Prince cultivates to create some of the most iconic works of art produced in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Prince's Cowboy series gives us a stunning anthology of the American obsession with the Frontier. This is not the frontier territory of reality but rather the “Wild West” as constructed by a group of 1970s ad executives with a product to sell. This is the cowboy given to us in♕ all of its idealism, designed purposefully to appeal to the values most prized in America: hard work, one with nature, strength, and boldness. Prince's goal in his early cowboy themed works was to make this machination explicit to the viewer in all of its artificiality.

Prince’s fascination with and use of the cowboy theme can be divided into four phases. In 1974, Prince was working the nightshift for Time-Life magazines and clipping editorials to assist the staff writers’ research. He found himself drawn to the leftover advertisements and the familiarity of their imagery, which we often take for granted. He began re-photographing the found advertisements, thereby removing all branding so that only the aesthetic splendor of the images remained. During this job, he came across the campaign of Marlboro Tobacco that immortalized the cowboy as a mythical representation🔯 of America in the form of the Marlboro Man. In the earliest iterations, he was forced to shoot around ad copy to obtain the final edit, resulting in tightly cropped, grainy close-ups of the larger-than-life ranchers, printed in standard format. In the second stage, improved laboratory techniques allowed him to substantially increase the scale and intensity of the final images. In the third phase he was able to work from high quality images. The third phase of his mining of the cowboy mythology was aided by the use of high-quality imagery that gave the photographs a new found crispness and clarity that surpassed even the original advertisement. Finally, having taken photography as a medium as far as it could go, Prince turned to painting to represent the iconic cowboy.

In this series from which the painting Untitled (Cowboy) belongs, Prince abandoned the Marlboro advertisement as source material. Instead, the source imagery was derived from old paperback book covers. These covers are scanned, enlarged and then printed onto the canvas. Sumptuous painterly strokes were then applied on top. This related very clearly to the technique used by Prince in his other famous series, the Nurse paintings. The Cowboy paintings debuted at Gagosian🐠 Beverly Hills in 2013. Always a fan of the cliché and its relevance to our contemporary culture, Prince filled these paintings with them. He overlayed a variety of cowboy images (standing ready with rifle; astride his trusty steed, pistol drawn; making a dramatic entrance through swinging saloon doors) with equally familiar expressionist gestures. The myth of the macho cowboy collides with the myth of the macho abstract expressionist artist to spectacular effect. The color palette of the paint used is psychedelic and ramps up the feeling of artificiality and pastiche. There is an impossibility to the colors used in the abstracted backgrounds. In this series Prince gives us a clever mediation on what is appropriated and what is original. Prince mocks the idea of uniqueness through his use of found imagery paired with derivative brushstrokes and gestures that although unique, mimic each other in appearance and allusion to art history.

Isolated under the expressionist layering of paint, the association with the Marlboro brand begins to fade and the pure image of a cowboy emerges. The legend of the cowboy is re-energized as a strangely moving figure out of our culture's dreams with the iconic cowboy becoming more powerful in 🉐the painting’s large scale. Prince lets us see and feel the power of the image behind the ad. At a glance, the cowboy paintings are ironic appropriations intended to deconstruct both a regressive stereotype and the truth of uninhibited artistic gesture. But on closer scrutiny, one can marvel, in the manner of a guilty pleasure, at Prince's masterfully casual renderings of figure and ground where the powerful male gunslingers are little more than ploys for free experimentation with paint. Lush, lurid abstract grounds, rapidly executed, replace the information of the former landscape backgrounds, intimating at various atmospheric conditions or temperaments. Prince starts out critical but now he relishes the inauthentic nature of these images and their mythology. He wants the viewer to relish in the visual pleasure one can get from his paintings and subject choice. The cowboy has been isolated and one can marvel at the actual figures out of their typical context. With this pleasure also comes a sense of nostalgia. This is Prince re-appropriating his own art. Just as in the early work he appropriated the advertisement stills to create an uncanny distance from the original brimming with nostalgia, Prince’s cowboy paintings appropriate the series that gave Prince his greatest success and as such represent a form of self-portraiture of this exceptional artist.