Richard Prince
Rephotographed the Marlboro cowboy, retyped other people's jokes, and has been sued over most of it.
Richard Prince was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1949 and worked in the tear-sheet department at Time Life, cutting advertisements out of magazines — which is where the method came from. From 1977 he rephotographed advertising imagery, most famously the Marlboro cowboy, and presented it as his own. The Joke paintings silkscreen borrowed one-line gags onto monochrome canvases; the Nurse paintings work from pulp romance covers; New Portraits enlarged other people's Instagram posts with his own comments underneath. Litigation over appropriation has followed him for four decades, with mixed outcomes.
Appropriation is the market's practical risk as well as its subject: several bodies of work have been the subject of copyright rulings, and a buyer's due diligence now routinely covers the legal status of a series. Photographic works exist in small editions, typically of two to ten, and edition and print date must be established precisely. The Nurse and Joke paintings are unique and lead. Prince has also made a large quantity of books, editions and multiples, and his own alterations to existing objects raise their own documentation questions.
If you own a work by Richard Prince
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.