Prince, of His Time
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

In the world of Richard Prince, art and commerce have no boundaries. But that’s not just because he incorporates advertising images and clip art in his paintings. He is a brand name artist who sells high — and helps sales, too. On Sunday, Mr. Prince’s “Wayward Nurse” (2005) — part of his Nurse Paintings series — sold for $2.09 million at Christie’s London sale of contemporary art. The price for this small work far exceeded its estimate, which was set at between $810,000 and $1.2 million. “We saw a huge response to it,” Christie’s postwar and contemporary art expert Brett Gorvy said. “It’s extremely beautiful and has wonderful color. It’s small-scale work from the series, but it’s in line with what we would see for a large scale.” A week before that, at the Louis Vuitton show in Paris, designer Marc Jacobs presented the results of his collaboration with Mr. Prince: a series of handbags worn by 12 models dressed as the mysterious, come-hither nurses who inspired the series of paintings. For works in the Nurse series, Mr. Prince appropriated sultry images of women from the covers of pulp fiction novels. While the idea of the naughty nurse was used initially to sell books, Mr. Prince removed it from that context for the sake of art. One of his paintings was later used by the band Sonic Youth — on the cover of its 2004 “Sonic Nurse” — to sell albums. And now, Mr. Jacobs has removed the concept from an art context again in order to — ultimately — sell luxury. (Which is not a criticism: This was by far the most creative and visually stimulating part of the show.)
Though his entry into the popular culture has given him a wider audience, Mr. Prince has been most helped by his current retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, according to Mr. Gorvy. “People have been amazed by the variety of his work,” he said.
Added Mr. Gorvy: “His market has revolutionized itself in the last two years.”
Popular though it may be, his work points to significant cultural questions about the use of art, as an essay in the Christie’s catalog shows: “‘Wayward Nurse,’ combining the harsh gestural surface, the brutal treatment of the paint and the subject, with what was formerly an idealized image designed specifically for its sexiness, here approaches these constructs from a new perspective that again exposes the strange mechanics of image presentation and interpretation in our consumerist, media-drenched society.”
Strange mechanics, indeed. But some beautiful handbags all the same.