“It was time to pay homage to an artist I really like. Some people worship at the altar - I believe in de Kooning.”
—Richard PrinceExecuted in 2007, Prince’s Untitled (De Kooning) is a striking example from the artist’s ‘de Kooning’ series which appropriated the visual lexicon of the iconic Abstract Expressionist artist. Amidst a painterly background, shifting from deep maroons and purples to hazy greys and washed-out pinks, Prince situates his three curiously distorted figures. A crudely painted outstretched arm and a bent leg are juxtaposed against printed photographic clippings of human limbs in various states of activity and repose. What remains true between all three figures are their painted faces, directly drawn from de Kooning’s own. Arresting and slightly unnerving in their comically stretched eyes and toothy grins, Prince successfully creates a work which merges his own oeuvre with that of his inspiration.
Prince’s motivation for this series came about while browsing a catalogue of de Kooning’s Women series, which were created between 1950 and 1953; now revered as canonical works of modern art, these paintings were at the time seen as repellant and grotesque depictions of the female form; visual manifestations of dark Freudian insights. Indeed, these works by de Kooning – which portray garish women rendered in vigorous, gestural brushstrokes – were, although vulgar, also considered expressions of sexual struggles, where the feminine confronts masculinity. It is this aspect of the Women series that Prince seems to have taken as a jumping off point.
Flipping through the catalogue, Prince began sketching over the paintings, sometimes adding male attributes to de Kooning’s women. As this project developed, Prince would apply fragments of male and female body parts – torsos, genitalia, thighs – over de Kooning’s originals, cutting and pasting from vintage magazines and physically drawing outlines and silhouettes with graphite and oil crayon.
From these frenetically created drawings evolved this current series of paintings, almost doubly removed from their subject matter; using an ink-jet printer to blow up these drawings onto large canvases, Prince then all but painted over the original material. The resulting effect is somewhere between painting and collage, abstract expressionism and pulp-fiction, and a testament to de Kooning’s own collage practice.
In an infamous exchange between critic Clement Greenberg and de Kooning, Greenberg questioned the role of figurative art in Modernism when he claimed that “In today’s world, it’s impossible to paint a face.” De Kooning responded, “That’s right. And it’s impossible not to.”i What de Kooning seems to be referencing here is the longstanding allure of the figure, and more importantly, the face; and the ways in which the human form both resists and invites being depicted. Prince’s appropriation of images in Untitled (de Kooning) is what he is known best for – although in this case, rather than sourcing his material from mass media and entertainment, he extends his artistic vocabulary into the realm of fine art. Cleverly co-opting de Kooning’s women as his own, Prince desecrates de Kooning’s already desecrated female figures to make something almost subversive in its beauty.
“Beauty becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It’s more joyous”
—Willem de Kooning