Untitled (Cowboy) Richard Prince 1989 - A Photo EditorA.
The present lot, Untitled (cowboy), 1986, is an exemplary work from his infamous cowboy series which first took form in 1981. Prince chose the rugged and handsome cowboy depicted in the Marlboro cigarette ads as his cultural protagonist. Prince explains “I started taking pictures of the cowboys.Untitled (Cowboy) The idea for the project that would challenge everything sacred about ownership in photography came to Richard Prince when he was working in the tear-sheet department at Time Inc.In his remarkable and famous photograph Untitled (Cowboy).1989 Richard Prince, re-photographing a photograph made by Sam Abell for a 1980’s Marlboro Man advertising campaign, condenses the sense of appropriation in art, as a practice that directly takes up the analysis Walter Benjamin expressed in his essay The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Untitled (Cowboy) The Marlboro Man cowboy, emblem of Marlboro cigarettes, was both a stereotypical icon of the American West and a romanticized anachronism. Taken from 1950s advertisements, these photographs depict the stoic, lone hero, riding through an expansive and untamed landscape, his horse as his only companion.Untitled (Cowboy), 1989 Ektacolor photograph 50 x 75 inches 127 x 190.5 cm Cowboys; Go Back.
Last year, Richard Prince (United States, b. 1949) completed a new body of work Untitled (cowboy), recently acquired and debuted by LACMA.Prince made the monumental photographs, which measure six feet high by eight feet wide, from high-resolution scans of 1980s and ’90s Marlboro advertisements depicting cowboys in the landscape.
