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Fwd: serious literature (he has 56 editions of Nabokov's
"Lolita") ...
"Lolita") ...
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----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2005 11:45:48 -0500
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: serious literature (he has 56 editions of Nabokov's "Lolita") ...
To: spklein52@hotmail.com
ARTS / ART & DESIGN | December 31, 2004
A Connoisseur of the Unnoticed, Having His Moment[1]
By CAROL VOGEL (NYT) News [2] [3]
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/arts/design/31prin.html[4]
A CONNOISSEUR OF THE UNNOTICED, HAVING HIS MOMENT
By CAROL VOGEL
Published: December 31, 2004
ENSSELAERVILLE, N.Y. - It could be the setting for a murder mystery:
a 1960's prefabricated house sitting empty in the middle of a field,
only the silver insulation left on its exterior. Buried in the
unkempt foliage out back is a 1973 Dodge Barracuda painted a flat
black.Chris Ramirez for The New York TimesNo more East Village
rentals: Richard Prince in his studio upstate in Rensselaerville,
N.Y. Phillips, de Pury & CompanyA 1981 print by the artist.
"It's very 'Twin Peaks,' " said the artist Richard Prince, 55, as he
pulled his pickup truck through the thicket. "The house is simple,
very indigenous to the area."
Mr. Prince bought the abandoned one-story structure and the
surrounding 80 acres sight unseen in 2001. "A New Jersey cop had
built it as a place to hunt," he explained. "It was a total mess."
What about the car? "Everyone has a car in their yard," he said,
adding that the silver insulation rather than proper siding is common
for the area, too.
As neglected as the house appears from the outside, inside is a
series of carefully conceived gallery spaces for art by Mr. Prince,
whose work has been in high demand lately. From the 1990's, there is
a sculpture fashioned from a car hood, a publicity photograph of Sid
Vicious and a planter cast from an old car tire. A road barrier cast
in plaster was made four years ago. There is also an example from his
1988-89 series of joke paintings, on which the words of a joke appear.
(Among the best known are "Every time I meet a girl who can cook like
my mother she looks like my father" and "I never had a penny to my
name, so I changed my name.")
The house, the car, the art are all for sale. But only as a package.
And it comes with conditions: nothing can be removed, unless a work of
art is requested for an exhibition. (Mr. Prince would not divulge his
asking a price; interested parties may contact his dealer, Barbara
Gladstone.)
Any buyer of what he calls "The Second House" (he and his family
live in an old farmhouse elsewhere on the property) will get a
sampling of the best of Mr. Prince: an original, often dark slice of
American pop culture seen through paintings, sculptures, drawings and
objects, all wrapped up in a neat domestic package. Since the late
1970's, Mr. Prince has been preoccupied with his personal perspective
on American life. He has recorded it by rephotographing magazine
images - cowboys appropriated from Marlboro cigarette advertisements,
pictures cribbed from periodicals about bikers, surfers, car fanatics
and heavy-metal musicians.
Mr. Prince has a fascination with pulp fiction, too. He has taken
images of female nurses from the covers of 1940's erotic novels, for
example, and made them the basis of a series of paintings, after a
little twisting to make them his own. These nurses are somewhat
demonic. Some are smeared with blood, others are wearing pristine
white surgical masks.
Mr. Prince relishes things that go unnoticed by most people and uses
them as the subject of his work - like the jokes, which are sometimes
accompanied by cartoons that capture his imagination but are
unrelated to the words of the jokes.
Obscure No More
Unlike Julian Schnabel or Robert Longo or the scores of other
artists who came of age in the 1980's and whose moment has faded, Mr.
Prince was ignored for years. Only now is he considered something of a
superstar. His works are fought over at auctions, and institutions
like the Museum of Modern Art are scouring the market to find some of
his early work. The galleries PaceWildenstein and Gagosian are
nibbling at the artist's heels, trying to persuade him to switch from
Ms. Gladstone, the Chelsea dealer who has represented him since 1987.
In late February Gagosian will show a group of Mr. Prince's new
paintings at its Los Angeles gallery. Called "The Check Paintings,"
they incorporate canceled checks from other artists, friends and
celebrities, and the exhibition has been timed to coincide with the
Oscars. "I always believed he would be a great artist, even though he
was underrecognized for years," Ms. Gladstone said. "His work is
understated, subtle."
There are diehard collectors of Mr. Prince's work, including Michael
Schwartz and the Miami collectors Donald and Mera Rubell, who began
buying his work 20 years ago. But they are exceptions. Most of the
people now paying high prices for his joke paintings, cowboy
photographs and hood sculptures only recently discovered his work.
Chrissie Isles, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, who
included a group of Mr. Prince's car hoods in the museum's 2003
biennial, said she believed he was popular now because he spoke to
"the cut-and-paste generation."
"He is not about vulgarity as much of the 1980's artists were;
rather he's about defining appropriation," she said. "Richard's
weaving pop culture - whether it's the cinema or Hell's Angels - into
something new that people can understand."
A Surprise $700,000
Ms. Gladstone bristles at the notion that Mr. Prince is "hot" right
now.
"Hot is a dangerous thing, a double-edged sword," she said. "A lot
of people like and need market validation." Indeed, in the
contemporary art world, which runs in large part on the herd
instinct, it was only when an early joke painting of Mr. Prince's
sold in May for more than $700,000 at a Phillips, de Pury & Company
auction in Chelsea that certain people began to pay attention. Since
then his prices have risen.
So has an appetite for the kind of images he captures.
"He is an artist who takes time to appreciate," said Peter Brant,
the newsprint magnate and collector who has been buying Mr. Prince's
work in depth for the last couple of years. "I went to see the nurse
show and was flabbergasted," he added, referring to an exhibition at
Gladstone last year.
Sandy Heller, a Manhattan art adviser, said Mr. Prince's appeal was
not limited to Americans: "Europeans love it, too, because it's their
view of what America is, as they know it from movies. He's Warhol's
heir."
Mr. Prince is a big Warhol fan. "Warhol and I have two things in
common," he said. "We have the same birthday and the same dentist."
He collects Warhol books. But then again, Mr. Prince is an obsessive
book collector.
His growing collection of books begins with Orwell's "1984," because
it was written in 1949, the year he was born, and includes everything
from serious literature (he has 56 editions of Nabokov's "Lolita") to
those 1940's erotic novels.
Some works he collects in depth. Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," for
instance. "I have everything but the manuscript - galleys, advanced
proofs, one with a trial dust jack, an inscribed copy of his
sister's, everything I can find," Mr. Prince said. He also has what
is believed to be the only known portion of the original manuscript
of "The Godfather" - the author's typed version complete with
corrections in his own hand - and an inscribed copy of Jacqueline
Susann's "Valley of the Dolls."
"When I was growing up we didn't have books," he said. "We only had
A-G of the encyclopedia." Mr. Prince was born in the Panama Canal
Zone but grew up in Braintree, Mass., a suburb of Boston.
The San Francisco Art Institute rejected his application, which
proposed as his project driving the teachers around in a 1968 Dodge
Charger, the same model used in the movie "Bullitt." So he moved to
New York in 1973 and began working at Time-Life, doing odd jobs like
compiling tear sheets or working in the employee bookstore.
"I had a secret studio in the subbasement," he said. "At the end of
the day all I had left was a batch of advertisements, so that's when
I began rephotographing them," he recalled. At that time, he said, he
didn't have his own studio. "I barely had an apartment; I rented rooms
for $75 a month in the East Village."
A Times Square Moment
Even now he doesn't have a darkroom. Everything is done in
commercial labs. For a while during his days at Time-Life he had the
graveyard shift, working all night compiling tear sheets. During his
two-hour break he would hang out in Times Square "and pretend I was
Tony Curtis in the 'Sweet Smell of Success,' " he said. It wasn't
until 1985 that he mustered up the courage to quit and work as an
artist full time.
For years Mr. Prince supported himself with odd jobs. One of his
favorites, he said, was editing photographs for Mademoiselle magazine
covers. "I got paid $500 a cover," he said. "My girlfriend was the art
director, and she would come home at night with the shoot, and I'd
select four or five images and rate them."
The year was 1985, and during that time newsstand sales increased 11
percent, he said. "It was totally anonymous work," Mr. Prince added.
"I liked it that way."
Little has changed. Today he likes his anonymous life in
Rensselaerville, where he and his wife, Noel, and their two children
moved seven years ago. Near their old farmhouse is a cluster of
buildings that serve as his studio and galleries. (These buildings
are not for sale.) A small retrospective of Mr. Prince's work fills
the walls of these galleries- many of the early joke paintings, the
car hood sculptures and a selection of drawings.
Mr. Prince has kept the first photograph he ever took: at Woodstock
in 1969. He had borrowed his mother's camera but it had only one
exposure left on the roll of film. "It was driving me nuts," he said.
"So at 7:30 I just whirled around and snapped it." He framed the shot
- a glimpse at the audience around him - and mounted his concert
ticket on the back.
Mr. Prince's archives and library are so large that he recently
bought an 1820's building in town, which he plans to turn into a
library.
"The public will be able to come in, and it's a place I can exhibit
any work that has to do with books," he said. "I've always liked the
idea of controlling the space in which the work is shown. It goes
back to the idea of domestic space, space that feels comfortable."
Links:
------
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/arts/design/31prin.html
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/pages/arts/index.html
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/arts/design/31prin.html
----- End forwarded message -----
Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2005 11:45:48 -0500
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: serious literature (he has 56 editions of Nabokov's "Lolita") ...
To: spklein52@hotmail.com
ARTS / ART & DESIGN | December 31, 2004
A Connoisseur of the Unnoticed, Having His Moment[1]
By CAROL VOGEL (NYT) News [2] [3]
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/arts/design/31prin.html[4]
A CONNOISSEUR OF THE UNNOTICED, HAVING HIS MOMENT
By CAROL VOGEL
Published: December 31, 2004
ENSSELAERVILLE, N.Y. - It could be the setting for a murder mystery:
a 1960's prefabricated house sitting empty in the middle of a field,
only the silver insulation left on its exterior. Buried in the
unkempt foliage out back is a 1973 Dodge Barracuda painted a flat
black.Chris Ramirez for The New York TimesNo more East Village
rentals: Richard Prince in his studio upstate in Rensselaerville,
N.Y. Phillips, de Pury & CompanyA 1981 print by the artist.
"It's very 'Twin Peaks,' " said the artist Richard Prince, 55, as he
pulled his pickup truck through the thicket. "The house is simple,
very indigenous to the area."
Mr. Prince bought the abandoned one-story structure and the
surrounding 80 acres sight unseen in 2001. "A New Jersey cop had
built it as a place to hunt," he explained. "It was a total mess."
What about the car? "Everyone has a car in their yard," he said,
adding that the silver insulation rather than proper siding is common
for the area, too.
As neglected as the house appears from the outside, inside is a
series of carefully conceived gallery spaces for art by Mr. Prince,
whose work has been in high demand lately. From the 1990's, there is
a sculpture fashioned from a car hood, a publicity photograph of Sid
Vicious and a planter cast from an old car tire. A road barrier cast
in plaster was made four years ago. There is also an example from his
1988-89 series of joke paintings, on which the words of a joke appear.
(Among the best known are "Every time I meet a girl who can cook like
my mother she looks like my father" and "I never had a penny to my
name, so I changed my name.")
The house, the car, the art are all for sale. But only as a package.
And it comes with conditions: nothing can be removed, unless a work of
art is requested for an exhibition. (Mr. Prince would not divulge his
asking a price; interested parties may contact his dealer, Barbara
Gladstone.)
Any buyer of what he calls "The Second House" (he and his family
live in an old farmhouse elsewhere on the property) will get a
sampling of the best of Mr. Prince: an original, often dark slice of
American pop culture seen through paintings, sculptures, drawings and
objects, all wrapped up in a neat domestic package. Since the late
1970's, Mr. Prince has been preoccupied with his personal perspective
on American life. He has recorded it by rephotographing magazine
images - cowboys appropriated from Marlboro cigarette advertisements,
pictures cribbed from periodicals about bikers, surfers, car fanatics
and heavy-metal musicians.
Mr. Prince has a fascination with pulp fiction, too. He has taken
images of female nurses from the covers of 1940's erotic novels, for
example, and made them the basis of a series of paintings, after a
little twisting to make them his own. These nurses are somewhat
demonic. Some are smeared with blood, others are wearing pristine
white surgical masks.
Mr. Prince relishes things that go unnoticed by most people and uses
them as the subject of his work - like the jokes, which are sometimes
accompanied by cartoons that capture his imagination but are
unrelated to the words of the jokes.
Obscure No More
Unlike Julian Schnabel or Robert Longo or the scores of other
artists who came of age in the 1980's and whose moment has faded, Mr.
Prince was ignored for years. Only now is he considered something of a
superstar. His works are fought over at auctions, and institutions
like the Museum of Modern Art are scouring the market to find some of
his early work. The galleries PaceWildenstein and Gagosian are
nibbling at the artist's heels, trying to persuade him to switch from
Ms. Gladstone, the Chelsea dealer who has represented him since 1987.
In late February Gagosian will show a group of Mr. Prince's new
paintings at its Los Angeles gallery. Called "The Check Paintings,"
they incorporate canceled checks from other artists, friends and
celebrities, and the exhibition has been timed to coincide with the
Oscars. "I always believed he would be a great artist, even though he
was underrecognized for years," Ms. Gladstone said. "His work is
understated, subtle."
There are diehard collectors of Mr. Prince's work, including Michael
Schwartz and the Miami collectors Donald and Mera Rubell, who began
buying his work 20 years ago. But they are exceptions. Most of the
people now paying high prices for his joke paintings, cowboy
photographs and hood sculptures only recently discovered his work.
Chrissie Isles, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, who
included a group of Mr. Prince's car hoods in the museum's 2003
biennial, said she believed he was popular now because he spoke to
"the cut-and-paste generation."
"He is not about vulgarity as much of the 1980's artists were;
rather he's about defining appropriation," she said. "Richard's
weaving pop culture - whether it's the cinema or Hell's Angels - into
something new that people can understand."
A Surprise $700,000
Ms. Gladstone bristles at the notion that Mr. Prince is "hot" right
now.
"Hot is a dangerous thing, a double-edged sword," she said. "A lot
of people like and need market validation." Indeed, in the
contemporary art world, which runs in large part on the herd
instinct, it was only when an early joke painting of Mr. Prince's
sold in May for more than $700,000 at a Phillips, de Pury & Company
auction in Chelsea that certain people began to pay attention. Since
then his prices have risen.
So has an appetite for the kind of images he captures.
"He is an artist who takes time to appreciate," said Peter Brant,
the newsprint magnate and collector who has been buying Mr. Prince's
work in depth for the last couple of years. "I went to see the nurse
show and was flabbergasted," he added, referring to an exhibition at
Gladstone last year.
Sandy Heller, a Manhattan art adviser, said Mr. Prince's appeal was
not limited to Americans: "Europeans love it, too, because it's their
view of what America is, as they know it from movies. He's Warhol's
heir."
Mr. Prince is a big Warhol fan. "Warhol and I have two things in
common," he said. "We have the same birthday and the same dentist."
He collects Warhol books. But then again, Mr. Prince is an obsessive
book collector.
His growing collection of books begins with Orwell's "1984," because
it was written in 1949, the year he was born, and includes everything
from serious literature (he has 56 editions of Nabokov's "Lolita") to
those 1940's erotic novels.
Some works he collects in depth. Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," for
instance. "I have everything but the manuscript - galleys, advanced
proofs, one with a trial dust jack, an inscribed copy of his
sister's, everything I can find," Mr. Prince said. He also has what
is believed to be the only known portion of the original manuscript
of "The Godfather" - the author's typed version complete with
corrections in his own hand - and an inscribed copy of Jacqueline
Susann's "Valley of the Dolls."
"When I was growing up we didn't have books," he said. "We only had
A-G of the encyclopedia." Mr. Prince was born in the Panama Canal
Zone but grew up in Braintree, Mass., a suburb of Boston.
The San Francisco Art Institute rejected his application, which
proposed as his project driving the teachers around in a 1968 Dodge
Charger, the same model used in the movie "Bullitt." So he moved to
New York in 1973 and began working at Time-Life, doing odd jobs like
compiling tear sheets or working in the employee bookstore.
"I had a secret studio in the subbasement," he said. "At the end of
the day all I had left was a batch of advertisements, so that's when
I began rephotographing them," he recalled. At that time, he said, he
didn't have his own studio. "I barely had an apartment; I rented rooms
for $75 a month in the East Village."
A Times Square Moment
Even now he doesn't have a darkroom. Everything is done in
commercial labs. For a while during his days at Time-Life he had the
graveyard shift, working all night compiling tear sheets. During his
two-hour break he would hang out in Times Square "and pretend I was
Tony Curtis in the 'Sweet Smell of Success,' " he said. It wasn't
until 1985 that he mustered up the courage to quit and work as an
artist full time.
For years Mr. Prince supported himself with odd jobs. One of his
favorites, he said, was editing photographs for Mademoiselle magazine
covers. "I got paid $500 a cover," he said. "My girlfriend was the art
director, and she would come home at night with the shoot, and I'd
select four or five images and rate them."
The year was 1985, and during that time newsstand sales increased 11
percent, he said. "It was totally anonymous work," Mr. Prince added.
"I liked it that way."
Little has changed. Today he likes his anonymous life in
Rensselaerville, where he and his wife, Noel, and their two children
moved seven years ago. Near their old farmhouse is a cluster of
buildings that serve as his studio and galleries. (These buildings
are not for sale.) A small retrospective of Mr. Prince's work fills
the walls of these galleries- many of the early joke paintings, the
car hood sculptures and a selection of drawings.
Mr. Prince has kept the first photograph he ever took: at Woodstock
in 1969. He had borrowed his mother's camera but it had only one
exposure left on the roll of film. "It was driving me nuts," he said.
"So at 7:30 I just whirled around and snapped it." He framed the shot
- a glimpse at the audience around him - and mounted his concert
ticket on the back.
Mr. Prince's archives and library are so large that he recently
bought an 1820's building in town, which he plans to turn into a
library.
"The public will be able to come in, and it's a place I can exhibit
any work that has to do with books," he said. "I've always liked the
idea of controlling the space in which the work is shown. It goes
back to the idea of domestic space, space that feels comfortable."
Links:
------
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/arts/design/31prin.html
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/pages/arts/index.html
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/arts/design/31prin.html
----- End forwarded message -----