Richard Prince

The Richard Prince retrospective, showing at the Guggenheim museum in New York between 29 September 2007 and 9 January 2008, proved a sale-boosting tribute, with Prince prices rocketing in November!

Richard PRINCE is an insatiable collector of pictures, works, photographs and advertising from which he draws the raw material for his works. Since all Prince art is about appropriating the image bank of popular culture and concentrates on an ironic look at American archetypes and stereotypes. The artist began to re-photograph advertising images and present American photography as his own in 1977 and explored various expressive media: photography, naturally, but also painting, sculpture and installations. .

While it was to take six years for Richard Prince to achieve a tenfold increase in his annual sales proceeds to a high of USD 14 million in 2006…2007 has beaten all expectation: at the New York sales in November, he realised no less than USD 15.3 million in two days and five hammers down!
The five million-ticket works sold between 13 and 15 November all exploded their estimated ranges, starting with Piney Woods Nurse, an attractive and gory nurse from 2002, which tripled its low-end pre-sale estimate when the bidding finally culminated at USD 5.4 million at Christie’s. The following day at Sotheby’s, two works were to double their estimates: the canvas He ain’t here yet, a simple joke on a monochrome background from 1988, for which the bidding soared to USD 1.2 million: followed several minutes later by a monumental ektacolour of a Cow-Boy (254 x169 cm) in front of a reddening twilight, purchased for USD 3 million…This iconic Cow-boy from the Marlboro advertising campaigns is the most expensive contemporary photograph on the market, ahead of 99 cent II by Andreas Gursky, which was sold last February by Sotheby’s for GBP 1.5 million, or around USD 2.9 million!
The million-ticket festival continued on 15 November at Phillips, de Pury & Company with two canvases from the Nurse series: early in the sale the first was sold for USD 1.9 million, swiftly followed by a more accomplished Registered Nurse which went for USD 3.8 million.

The Nurses and Cow-boys are the most highly-priced series, accounting for 9 of the 10 million-ticket sales over the past two years. While numerous photographic prints in a twenty-plus series change hands for anything between USD 1,000 and 10,000 on average, the starting price for a modest-sized painting (sixty or so centimeters) is currently USD 100,000. Just four years ago it was less than USD 20,000!
By way of example: Was that a girl, a 1989 canvas from the Cartoons series in which the artist appropriates comic strips, changed hands for USD 19,000 at Sotheby’s NY in 2003. In February 2007, the same work pushed the bidding up to GBP 58,000, or USD 118,000, at the same auction house.