Richard Prince at Barbara Gladstone - New York

It did not seem likely in the early 1980s that Richard Prince, an artist best known for appropriating advertising photographs, would ever be very interested in painting. When he did begin exhibiting paintings later that decade, the work seemed conceptual, a kind of mock Minimalism. If he was going to try some fancier brushwork, he might have been expected to engage in the well-worn tactic of gussying up mechanically reproduced images with "expressionistic" smears of paint, in the tradition of Rauschenberg. At first glance, that's what he seemed to be doing in his recent works at Gladstone, but a closer look reveals that he is now grappling more directly with issues specific to painting.

The subject matter in the exhibition--nurses from pulp fiction book covers--fits easily into Prince's pantheon of American media subcultures, from his recent "Publicity" collages to his Marlboro men ("Cowboys") and pictures of biker chicks. The nurse idea itself had a media version in Prince's photo of the model Kate Moss in a nurse's uniform, published in the September 2003 issue of W magazine.

To create his "Nurse Paintings," Prince scans the book covers, with their figures and titles, into a computer, using inkjet printing to transfer them to canvas; he then does overpainting and backgrounds in acrylic. The nurses almost always wear sanitary masks over their noses and mouths, though Prince varies the placement, scale and cropping of his figures. In some cases, he follows the original book designs; in others, he finds his own way.

Surfing Nurse #2 (all works 2002 to 2003), for example, has the figure at the lower right of a horizontal canvas, clearly not a book-cover format. In this painting, Prince's controlled technique tempers his subject matter, by implication lurid. Most of the work is given over to an expanse of dark greens--from army green, at the center, to forest green, along the edges. The brushstrokes are carefully applied, creating a measured tone. In the figure, by contrast, the colors are more garish, creating a dichotomy between the hot subject and the cool background. Drips of paint are an additional painterly element that feels natural, not calculated.

With their masks, the figures seem neutral. Do they remain--as they were in their original covers--sex objects? The titillation has as much to do with nostalgia for the artifacts of a lost pulp culture as with sexual desire or even violence. In Piney Woods Nurse, the reds in the background and oozing down the nurse's dress suggest blood. New England Nurse sets its figure and title in a wash of slashing deep red and orange strokes, implying--as the original covers might have--some kind of deadly conflagration, as well as the heat of passion. Prince paints these torrid images without impasto, his brushstrokes quietly alive.

A painting like Lake Resort Nurse, with its dark panel hovering over the yellow title text and red-orange ground, makes one wonder whether Prince was thinking of Rothko. While he has a long way to go to approach that level of artistic achievement, Prince's relationship with painting has clearly deepened.

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