RICHARD PRINCE I CHANGED MY NAME, 1988 (I Never Had a Penny to My Name, So I Changed My Name.)

MY ACCOUNT PREFERRED LOYALTY PROGRAM SIGN UP FOR EMAIL RECENTLY VIEWED WISH LIST MY BAG 0

FREE SHIPPING ON ORDERS OF $99 OR MORE DETAILS* Can we help you ﬁnd something?

WOMEN MEN UNDERWEAR FRAGRANCE HOME SALE PROJECTS

1 RICHARD PRINCE I CHANGED MY NAME, 1988 (I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name.)

Richard Prince, I Changed My Name, 1988 © Richard Prince LULU Acrylic and screen print on canvas (142.5 cm x 198.7 cm) Photographed by Willy Vanderperre at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami.

Monochromatic Jokes

Richard Prince’s Jokes series remains among his But if you bothered listening to one there was nothing most iconic. On the eve of a 2013 retrospective at recorded on it. New York’s Nahmad Contemporary Gallery, writer and Only white noise to greet you. kindred spirit Bill Powers riffed on the essence of He thought he might give the cassettes out at galleries like demo tapes. these works for the show’s catalog. The piece is Like musicians did at record labels to get signed. excerpted below. Within a year he began silk-screening jokes on canvas. He wasn’t a funny guy. He made them with black text on a white background, He wasn’t the life of the party. but then decided that wasn’t quite right. But most comedy isn’t about entertaining as it is about He painted over them. survival. There’s an installation shot in Spiritual America before And he wanted to live. he destroyed the paintings. He didn’t make art looking for love. The answer he arrived at ﬁnally was to paint the jokes Who could love four men looking in the same using strange colors. direction? Strange combinations. It was so ugly he wouldn’t hang it in his own house. The colors would be a stand-in for the missing image. He wouldn’t hang it in your house. Or rather lack of image. He lived with his girlfriend. It’s not for nothing that his friend Christopher Wool Her apartment was at 303 Park Avenue South. was making text pieces at the time. In the back he set up a little studio. Except Wool was a deconstructionist, exploding This was after his post studio period. syllables and reshufﬂing etymology. Post, post studio. Richard Prince was vacillating between ideas about The year was 1986. painting and illustration. He started writing out stolen jokes. Studying cartoon captions one comes across in Maybe not stolen, but almost authorless. men’s magazines. Borscht Belt stuff. A struggle he would explore later in white paintings. A step above knock knocks. For now, he was deep in his monochromatic joke Old jokes for young people. phase. Ten dollars a joke. The year was 1987. Which quickly became twenty dollars a joke. The month was March. They weren’t his lines, but they were written in his Art in America puts Prince on the cover. hand. It turns out to be a real game changer. And they counted for something. Print periodicals still meant something then. He wrote out a few jokes on the liners of cassette Maybe he wouldn’t have to take the assistant teaching tapes. gig in Maine that he’d been offered. He thought of them almost as mix tapes. Maybe there’d be pennies to his name. Almost as set lists. –Bill Powers 2 RICHARD PRINCE NUTS, 2000 (A guy goes to a psychiatrist wearing only Saran Wrap. The psychiatrist says to the guy, I can clearly see your nuts you nut.) Richard Prince, Nuts, 2000 © Richard Prince Acrylic on canvas (284.5 cm x 517 cm)

RICHARD PRINCE “THERE’S

Richard Prince was born in 1949 in NOTHING the Panama Canal Zone and lives CONFUSING and works in upstate New York. ABOUT Mining images from mass media, MAKING ART FOR advertising and entertainment since the late ’70s, Prince has redefined ME. the concepts of authorship, I CAN’T BUILD A ownership and aura. Applying his HOUSE. understanding of the complex transactions of representation to the I CAN’T RIDE A creation of art, he evolved a unique HORSE. signature filled with echoes of other I CAN’T REPAIR A signatures yet that is unquestionably CAR. his own. He evolved a unique signature filled with echoes of other I CAN’T SING AND signatures that remain © Richard Prince, 2005 I CAN’T VOTE. unquestionably idiosyncratic. WAVY

An avid collector and chronicler, HAIR. FRECKLES Prince brings American subcultures ON A to the forefront and explores their FACE. AN ARM role in the construction of diverse American identities. Among other DEFINED things, he has probed the depths of racism, sexism and psychosis BY A VEIN. I CAN through the guise of humor and the MAKE ART.” mythical status of cowboys, bikers, muscle cars and celebrities. Most Richard Prince recently, he has examined the push- pull allure of pulp ﬁction and soft porn, producing unlikely icons such as the highly coveted Nurse paintings.

3 ANDY WARHOL SKULL, 1976 Andy Warhol, Skull, 1976 © The Andy Warhol Foundation / ARS Photographed by Willy Wanderperre at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

THE DEATH AND DISASTER SERIES

Most of us know Andy Warhol for his lighter side. He’s the man who treated Campbell’s cans and Brillo boxes as art, who partied hard at Max’s Kansas City and Studio 54. But there was also, always, a more serious side to the artist, and it helps conﬁrm his greatness.

In the 1980s, Warhol the party animal painted guns and crosses and skulls, and also himself as a death’s-head. In the 1960s, in the moment that came between his cans and his Andy Warhol, Little Electric Chair, 1964-1965 Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh boxes, he made a major series of works that came to be © The Andy Warhol Foundation for The Visual Arts, Inc. called the Death and Disaster paintings. One shows an electric chair, last deployed in the state of New York the same year Warhol portrayed it. Another depicts a bunch of white cops siccing dogs on black civil rights marchers. Two ambulances crash in a third. Suicides and food poisonings ﬂesh out the series.

The curator Henry Geldzahler was a friend and fan of Warhol’s, and he liked to take credit for the artist’s turn from Pop light to the shadows: “It’s enough life. It’s time for a little death,” he told Warhol once his soup cans were done. But in fact Warhol had always engaged with turmoil in the world around him. Already in 1948, as a college student in Pittsburgh, he’d signed a petition pitching the presidency of Henry Wallace, a left-leaning New Dealer who was that moment’s Bernie Sanders. The petition got him and his fellow signers branded as Commies by the local press.

Warhol moved to New York the next year, and the images he made there often had an equally serious side. Almost at once, he was chosen as the perfect artist to help sell a documentary about the drug trade. His award-winning ad was a chilling image of an addict with a needle up his arm.

For the rest of the decade, when he made the drawings that he counted as his “art,” they were often based on the most sober photojournalism. And even when his art went more ﬂippant and fey—which was a lot of the time—there was a serious undercurrent: By camping it up, he was expressing, even celebrating, a queer identity that was despised at the time.

So the Death and Disaster paintings don’t come out of nowhere. They also don’t lead to nothing. Warhol stayed politically engaged, in his own quiet way, for the rest of his life. In the 1972 presidential election, he won the hatred of Richard Nixon by depicting him as a kind of Wicked Witch of the West, in a poster supporting Nixon’s lefty rival George McGovern. The vast trove of papers that Warhol stored up for the rest of his life—something like 500,000 pages of documents—overﬂow with thank-yous from progressive causes. Their fundraisers could usually count on having a fresh Warhol or two to auction off.

Warhol’s Death and Disaster paintings help prove his greatness as an artist. They also present him as an engaged and thoughtful citizen.

Blake Gopnik’s Daily Pic appears at BlakeGopnik.com and ArtnetNews.com, where he is critic at large. His comprehensive biography of Andy Warhol will be published by HarperCollins; for a preview, visit Warholiana.com.

4 ANDY WARHOL AMBULANCE DISASTER, 1963- 64 Andy Warhol, Ambulance Disaster, 1963-64 © The Andy Warhol Foundation / ARS Photographed by Willy Vanderperre at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

5 ANDY WARHOL ELVIS 11 TIMES (STUDIO TYPE), 1963 Andy Warhol, Elvis 11 Times (Studio Type), 1963 © The Andy Warhol Foundation / ARS Photographed by Willy Vanderperre at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

ANDY WARHOL “ONCE YOU ‘GOT’

Thirty years after his death, Andy POP, Warhol (1928-1987) remains one of YOU COULD the most influential figures in NEVER contemporary art and culture. SEE A SIGN THE Warhol’s life and work inspires creative thinkers worldwide thanks to SAME his enduring imagery, his artfully WAY. AND ONCE cultivated celebrity, and the ongoing YOU research of dedicated scholars. THOUGHT POP, His impact as an artist is far deeper YOU and greater than soup cans and his COULD NEVER prescient observation that “everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.” Andy Warhol, Self Portrait with Movie Camera, ca. 1971. The SEE Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh His omnivorous curiosity resulted in © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. AMERICA THE an enormous body of work that SAME spanned every available medium and WAY AGAIN.” most importantly contributed to the collapse of boundaries between high Andy Warhol and low culture. Between 1964 and 1966, Warhol created almost five hundred Screen Tests of famous and anonymous visitors to his studio, The Factory, including Salvador Dalí, Dennis Hopper, and Edie Sedgwick. Warhol filmed his subjects using a stationary, silent Bolex camera loaded with 100-foot rolls of black and white 16mm film. Sitters were instructed to sit still for about three minutes, the length of time it took for the roll of film to run through the camera. He later projected the Screen Tests in slow motion, thereby extending their duration and imbuing them with a dreamlike stillness. During the 1960s, these films were rarely shown in public, but were often shown at The Factory. 6 AMERICAN CLASSICS

“It has to be good,” Andy Warhol once said of popular art—otherwise, “so many people wouldn't like it.”

For Andy Warhol, who began his career illustrating fashion ads, the separation between art and advertising was slim, their iconography interchangeable. And the story of Pop Art, from the ’50s all the way up to the present, is that collapsing of the American lexicon so that of our dreams and archetypes inhabit a single plane—cowboys, pinup dolls, and superheroes now share the collective consciousness with the latest screen star, a soup can, or a Brillo pad.

Seen this way, the perfect male form wearing Calvin Klein cotton briefs on a Times Square billboard in 1982, became a new kind of colossus; and a teenage girl, high-kicking in her classic Calvin Klein “designer” denim jeans from 1980, a disco-era Lady Liberty. These things loomed large—they still do—and those garments have become pop icons unto themselves.

The Spring 2017 Calvin Klein campaign is a celebration of these American classics, placing the archival denim, cotton tank top and quintessential men’s briefs in playful contrast and context with great works of art from the second half of the 20th century. Here the clothes strike up a conversation with the art much the way designers and artists in New York’s Pop heyday would have in the streets of SoHo or on the dance ﬂoor of Studio 54.

At the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, a treasure trove of contemporary art collected and commissioned over the last 50 years by Don Rubell (brother of Studio 54’s Steve), his wife Mera, and their son Jason, a group of models in iconic Calvin Klein essentials are photographed by Willy Vanderperre in front of vibrant works by Sterling Ruby, Richard Prince, and Dan Flavin; while at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, they stand in careful consideration of the artist’s Elvis 11 Times, Skull, Ambulance Disaster, and, ﬁttingly, Statue of Liberty. Like the statue, the shock- red and blue dyed ﬂag by the German-born Ruby, too, might suggest something patriotic and almost clothing- like. And Prince, who would go on to make those same cowboys and saints and sinners of the American mythos such a big part of his later work, who would reappropriate reappropriation as his own métier, here, with his witty, playful block-lettered one-liners, might draw our attention to the light lettering of the Calvin Klein logo around the briefs’ waistbands. Not that we’d confuse the branding with the wearer’s identity, as Lorraine did with Marty McFly.

The conscious contextualizing in these pictures indeed does wonders, stacking up totems of references and meaning. But these pictures also seem to be about time, the way its passage ﬁlters out anything that is inessential. What remains of our popular culture after 50 years, after 30—like Warhol himself, who died 30 years ago this month—has to be good. What endures becomes a classic.

Dan Flavin Calvin Klein By Appointment LOCATION: UNITED STATES FIND A STORE

CUSTOMER ASSISTANCE EXPLORE ABOUT CONTACT CONNECT

CUSTOMER ASSISTANCE PLATINUM ABOUT CALVIN KLEIN SEND US AN EMAIL RECEIVE EMAIL UPDATES RETURNS WOMEN CAREERS CHAT WITH US email address SUBMIT TRACK ORDER MEN TIMELINE CALL US AT 866.513.0513 SIZE GUIDES men | women UNDERWEAR BRANDS

PREFERRED CUSTOMER FRAGRANCE FILMS PROGRAM Like 11M Follow HOME

SHIPPING +1 STORE LOCATOR FOLLOW 7.8k ACCESSIBILITY