Untitled

A principal author of 1980s “appropriation art,” Richard Prince had worked early on in the tear-sheet department of Time Life, building a personal archive of advertising remnants. Then, in 1984, he began to draw wholesale copies of quintessential one-liner cartoons published in the New Yorker magazine—soon separating the images from their captions and assigning them new ones. In his White Paintings series, Prince explored a still more complex jumbling of image and text, combining numerous disjointed jokes, lines borrowed from songs and ads, and graphic cartoon outtakes. On the one hand, Prince was turning the medium of painting, almost literally, into a joke. On the other hand, a work like Untitled—which marks Prince’s transition into the White Paintings—is surprisingly haunting, rich with detail but also ghostly, as if about to dissolve.