"It was time to pay homage to an artist I really like. Some people worship at the altar—I believe in de Kooning." —Richard Prince
Untitled (with de Kooning), 2006, exemplifies Richard Prince’s unabashed incorporation of subjects culled from life into his art. Prince pays tribute to Willem de Kooning as he blurs the boundaries between admirer and artist, blending elements of de Kooning’s works with his own. Prince combines magazine cutouts taken from adult magazines with imagery from de Kooning’s Woman paintings of the 1950s, engaging with the Abstract Expressionist’s work in ways both ironic and inventive. Evoking de Kooning’s own artistic appropriations, Prince seizes his predecessor’s work in daring style.
"I have always liked de Kooning’s Women paintings. It started off with a book of his, And I just started drawing on it… after I did the books, I started to make collages. So, it’d be like one of his women on the left, and one of my men on the right… You know, it’s just kind of a new way of dealing with the figure, this idea of the photographic part and the drawing part fused together." —Richard Prince
Borrowing from the vernaculars of advertisement, popular culture, and art history, Prince’s shrewd recontextualizations of found media raise questions of ownership, authorship, and reproduction. Prince embarked on his career as a member of the Pictures Generation in the 1970’s, pioneering a new style of artistic “re-photography” that tests the boundaries of exclusivity and agency; the present work drives this exploration forward as it incorporates Prince’s interest in popular imagery—largely of men, subjecting the Woman paintings to yet another distortion—with his reverence for the work of Willem de Kooning. With a knowing nod to the controversy that de Kooning’s work generated in the New York art world at the time, Prince similarly pushes the boundaries of art making by transforming his forebears’ women into hybrid subjects. Beyond merging male and female anatomies, Prince blurs the boundaries of painting with photography and print—creating an explosive work in which "high" and "low" art collide with undeniable immediacy.