Untitled (couple)
In the mid-1970s, Prince was an aspiring painter who earned his living at Time-Life clipping articles from magazines for staff writers. What was left at the end of the day were the ads: gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models that provoked in the artist an uneasy mix of fascination and repulsion, disgust and envy. By 1977, Prince had begun rephotographing these advertisements in order to, as he put it, "turn the lie back on itself." Acting as art director, artist, and viewer, he imagined his purloined images as stills from a movie in his head. He developed a repertoire of strategies--blurring, cropping, enlarging, grouping--that undermined the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the image, revealing it to be a hallucination, a fiction of society's desires.
Artwork Details
- Title: Untitled (couple)
- Artist: Richard Prince (American, born Canal Zone (Panama), 1949)
- Date: 1976
- Medium: Mixed media on paper
- Dimensions: 58.7 x 73.7 cm (23 1/8 x 29 in. )
- Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel and Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2000
- Object Number: 2000.156
- Rights and Reproduction: © Richard Prince
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
More Artwork
A slider containing 5 items.
Press the down key to skip to the last item.
Press the down key to skip to the last item.
Richard Prince
1980
Richard Prince
1980
Richard Prince
1980
Richard Prince
1980
Richard Prince
1999–2000
Research Resources
The Met provides unparalleled resources for research and welcomes an international community of students and scholars. The Met's Open Access API is where creators and researchers can connect to the The Met collection. Open Access data and public domain images are available for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use without permission or fee.
To request images under copyright and other restrictions, please use this Image Request form.
Feedback
We continue to research and examine historical and cultural context for objects in The Met collection. If you have comments or questions about this object record, please complete and submit this form. The Museum looks forward to receiving your comments.