Narrative art, which combines images and text, was a significant medium for conceptual and appropriation artists during the 1970s and 1980s. Richard Prince began to create collages with photographs and text after arriving in New York in late 1973. By the late 1970s, he incorporated found images from books and magazines into his collages, which anticipate his later use of Pop images.
Art into Activity Equals Art onto Artist and Property Owner
Collages, such as Art into Activity Equals Art onto Artist and Property Owner from 1976, are notable for their simplicity and use of typed text. They are linear in format and tell a story from left to right. Property Owner recounts the story of how Prince was given a free parking space as a reward for stopping a burglary at Air France Securities across the street from his Renwick Street studio. In the photographs, Prince proudly and humorously touts his newly awarded “property”; its boundaries are clearly marked in the snow.
Lot 46: Richard Prince, Art into Activity Equals Art onto Artist, monoprint with chromogenic prints and notepaper with typed and handwritten text collage bonded to cream wove paper, 1976. Estimate $20,000 to $30,000.
Several early narrative collages were experimental and humble, often containing the phrase “Like most everybody else,” as in Art into Activity Equals Art onto Artist. “Like most everybody else” is also repeated in Prince’s contemporaneous writing, “Eleven Conversations,” which appeared in the periodical Tracks, vol.2, no. 3 (Fall 1976). “Eleven Conversations” is comprised of statements that open with the clichéd line, “Like most everybody else.” In a 1982 conversation with Barbara Kruger republished in BOMB, no. 155 (2021), Prince recalled that he took the text from the back of Elvis Presley bubble gum cards, playing with the concepts of celebrity dictum and originality. The use of text also anticipates Prince’s later works; Roberta Smith, in her review of Prince’s early collage works for The New York Times in February 9, 2007, noted that the tone of Prince’s texts in his 1970s collages is “eerily close to the flat, anesthetized voice of Mr. Prince’s later joke drawings and paintings, with the same sense of stifling conformity, only more innocent.”
Lot 47: Richard Prince, Property Owner, Monoprint with color aquatint, chromogenic prints, and notepaper with typed and handwritten text collage bonded to cream wove paper, 1976. Estimate $20,000 to $30,000.
Exhibitions
Property Owner, and another Prince collage, Post Studio Artist, were exhibited in 1976-77 in the 20th National Print Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum (November 20, 1976 – January 30, 1977, numbers 232 and 233 respectively), which credits Prince as the printer. To incorporate the photographs and the written and typed pages into the prints, the media was placed face down on the inked surface and passed through the press with Copperplate paper. The prints were published by Ellen Sragow, Ltd./Prints on Prince St., New York, which was founded in 1973 on Prince Street in Soho. The gallery became Ellen Sragow Gallery in 1976 when it moved to the Fine Arts Building in Tribeca. It specialized in selling artwork by emerging artists like Prince and artists of the WPA. Sragow began to exhibit works by Richard Prince in the late 1970s, including three of his solo shows. “Workout,” an exhibition from March 12 – 19, 1976, included Prince’s performance piece, Match, in which the artist engaged player Richard “Boo” Marcom in a ping pong game. Match is referenced in Art into Activity Equals Art onto Artist, documenting the multi-day performance. Workout was followed by the Sragow exhibitions In Complete Control, September 25 – October 23, 1976, and The Author, November 19 – December 17, 1977.
Prince’s early works are rare; Property Owner, Post Studio Artist, and another Untitled collage from 1976, exhibited in Print Making/New Forms at the Whitney Museum of American Art from April 7 to May 19, 1976, were each printed in an edition of only five. There was a renewed interest in Prince’s 1970s works when they were exhibited in the 2007 show Fugitive Artist: The Early Work of Richard Prince, 1974 – 1977 at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College. This exhibition was organized by art historian Michael Lobel, who had rediscovered these works in several public, private, and corporate collections. The show included 13 of Prince’s monoprints with collage elements, which were long thought to have been destroyed by Prince, who did not grant Lobel permission to reproduce photographs of them. Though these early works are technically more involved and only faintly resemble Prince’s later famous works, they contain the seeds of his mature style and tell the story of a young artist in the process of forging an identity.
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