Untitled (Cowboy)

What was left after the articles

Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone. In 1973 he moved from the suburbs outside Boston to New York, and in the mid-1970s, while trying to make it as a painter, he earned a living in the tear-sheet department at Time-Life, clipping articles out of magazines for staff writers.

What remained at the end of the day were the advertisements: glossy luxury goods, impossibly perfect models and, in ad after ad for Marlboro cigarettes, cowboys. Prince began rephotographing them with a 35mm camera, cropping tightly to eliminate all text, and sending his slides to commercial labs to be printed and enlarged. He then presented the prints, in small editions, as his own work.

Between 1980 and 1992 the cowboy was his recurring subject. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the result as a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy). Prince, who called the series "normalcy as special effect," described the moment he hit on the method in grand terms: "This was the break. This was what I was hoping for."

The men behind the Marlboro Man

The pictures Prince took were themselves carefully staged fictions. Until the mid-1950s, Marlboro had been marketed exclusively to women. As the first reports linked smoking to lung cancer, the company recast the brand as rugged and masculine with the advertising agency Leo Burnett, which settled on the cowboy after testing other masculine types. The campaign ran nationally from 1955 until 1999, and the brand became the world's top-selling cigarette in 1972.

The cowboy had already been mythologized in print. A Life magazine photo-essay by Leonard McCombe on the Texas rancher Clarence Hailey Long was billed as a last look at the "old time cowboy," and by the mid-1950s Leo Burnett had adopted McCombe's images as the conceptual framework for the Marlboro Man.

Many of the ads Prince rephotographed were shot by commercial photographers who were never credited, by the ads or by Prince. One was Norm Clasen, a Colorado photographer hired by the agency in the late 1970s after a test shoot; his 1985 Sunset Chase, Riverton, WY shows a cowboy riding into an orange sunset, whirling a lasso. Clasen has estimated that about 17 of his images were copied. "Somebody took that work and rephotographed it," he said in 2018. "They're not the ones that were out there lying with the rattlesnakes, the ants, the mosquitos."

A cowboy for the Reagan years and after

Prince chose the Marlboro cowboy just as it was falling from grace. As smoking-related illness claimed even some of the men who had played the Marlboro Man, the image became a symbol of manipulation as much as freedom. Critics have tied the series to its political moment: Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood cowboy actor often photographed in Western clothes, began his presidency in 1981, and the Met calls its 1989 print a "meditation on an entire culture's continuing attraction to spectacle over lived experience."

Around 2000 Prince returned to the motif with new tools. Working digitally, he could rephotograph an entire ad and remove the copy by computer instead of cropping around it, producing wider, more cinematic images. Sources describe the cowboy work as running from 1980 to 1992 and then resuming around 2000, yet prints dated 1997 and 1999 have sold publicly, so Prince was evidently still issuing cowboy prints in between. The 2000s cowboys arrived as a new president's foreign policy was being called "cowboy diplomacy."

He kept going back. In 2013 he photographed real Western landscapes such as Monument Valley for a series called Untitled (Original Cowboy), and in 2015-16 he made monumental six-by-eight-foot prints from high-resolution scans of 1980s and 1990s Marlboro ads, torn edges and tape included, which the Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired and showed in 2017-18.

The 1997 print and its sales

Prince issued the 1997 Untitled (Cowboy) as an Ektacolor print in an edition of two plus one artist's proof. Print 1/2, signed in the upper right margin and on the back, was handled first by a New York gallery and then a private collector. It sold at auction in New York on November 16, 2006, passed to a London gallery, and was bought from there in 2007 by the owner who kept it for 17 years. The 2006 price is not stated in the sources reviewed.

Literature on the print records another example from the edition illustrated in the art journal Parkett in 2004 and exhibited in Buenos Aires in 2018, in a museum show of works by Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince drawn from the Astrup Fearnley Collection.

On October 9, 2024, print 1/2 sold at auction in London for £2,097,000 against an estimate of £1.2 million to £1.8 million, about $2,600,280 at the time. It was the highest-priced photograph sold at auction anywhere in 2024, and Prince cowboys also took second and third place that year: an Untitled (Cowboy) of 1999 at $1,865,000 and Silhouette Cowboy of 1998-99 at $1,744,000.

Print 2/2 of a 1997 Untitled (Cowboy), also an Ektacolor print in an edition of two plus one artist's proof, sold at auction in New York on November 9, 2021, for $3,030,000 against an estimate of $1.5 million to $2.5 million. Its cataloguers described a lone horseman on a white horse riding down a slope at sunrise, lasso raised. The two catalogue entries give slightly different measurements, and the sources do not explicitly confirm that the two prints show the same image, though the matching date and edition strongly suggest it.

Records, lawsuits and how to read one

Prince's cowboys have repeatedly set records. In November 2005 an Untitled (Cowboy) sold at auction in New York for $1,248,000, the first single photograph to sell for more than $1 million at auction. A trade newsletter reported only three prints of that image were known, one of them in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose print is dated 1989 and was bought in 2000. An artist's proof of a 2000 Untitled (Cowboy) made $3,525,000 in New York in May 2016, and another Marlboro-derived work was reported to have made $3.7 million in 2014.

Appropriation has also brought Prince into court. The photographer Patrick Cariou sued him in 2008 over images taken from Cariou's book Yes Rasta; a district court ruled against Prince in 2011, and an appeals court overturned the verdict in 2013. Prince has said that "artists don't sue other artists."

To identify a cowboy print, start with the title, date and edition. Prince used the same title, Untitled (Cowboy), for many different images, so the year, the edition number and the dimensions are what separate one work from another. Prints from the 1980s are tightly cropped 35mm rephotographs; works from 2000 on were made digitally and show more of the original ad. The 1997 prints are Ektacolor prints about 50 by 75 inches, signed and numbered in the margin.

The numbers

Medium

Ektacolor print

Dimensions

Image 127 x 191.6 cm (50 x 75 3/8 in.) for print 1/2; 126.4 x 193 cm (49 3/4 x 76 in.) given for print 2/2

Edition

Two plus one artist's proof

Catalogue raisonné

No number stated in the sources reviewed

Current owner

Not disclosed after the October 2024 sale

Related public example

Untitled (cowboy), 1989, chromogenic print, 127 x 177.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art (2000.272)

Timeline

1. 1949

   Richard Prince is born in the Panama Canal Zone.

2. 1973

   Prince moves to New York and later takes a job clipping magazines at Time-Life.

3. 1980

   He begins rephotographing Marlboro cowboy advertisements, a motif he pursues through 1992.

4. 1985

   Norm Clasen shoots Sunset Chase, Riverton, WY, one of the Marlboro images later rephotographed by Prince.

5. 1989

   Prince makes the Untitled (Cowboy) print now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

6. 1997

   Prince issues Untitled (Cowboy) as an Ektacolor print in an edition of two plus one artist's proof.

7. 2000

   The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquires its 1989 Untitled (Cowboy).

8. 2004

   An example from the 1997 edition is illustrated in Parkett.

9. Nov 2005

   An Untitled (Cowboy) sells for $1,248,000 in New York, the first photograph to top $1 million at auction.

10. Nov 16, 2006

    Print 1/2 of the 1997 Untitled (Cowboy) sells at auction in New York.

11. 2007

    The 1997 print 1/2 is bought from a London gallery by the owner who will sell it in 2024.

12. May 10, 2016

    An artist's proof of a 2000 Untitled (Cowboy) sells for $3,525,000 in New York.

13. Dec 2017

    LACMA shows Prince's 2015-16 monumental Untitled (cowboy) prints.

14. Nov 9, 2021

    Print 2/2 of a 1997 Untitled (Cowboy) sells for $3,030,000 in New York.

15. Oct 9, 2024

    Print 1/2 of the 1997 Untitled (Cowboy) sells for £2,097,000 (about $2.6 million) in London, the top photography lot of the year.

The world in 1955

• 1955

  The Marlboro Man campaign begins running nationally; it will last until 1999.

• 1972

  Marlboro becomes the world's top-selling cigarette brand.

• 1981

  Ronald Reagan, a former screen cowboy, begins his presidency.

• 1999

  The national Marlboro Man campaign ends.

• 2001

  George W. Bush takes office; his foreign policy is later dubbed "cowboy diplomacy."

• 2008

  Photographer Patrick Cariou sues Prince over appropriated images.

• 2013

  An appeals court overturns the 2011 ruling against Prince in the Cariou case.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Untitled (Cowboy) is number 24 of 100 in the art entries of the FLOAT 100. 88 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (24 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Prince found his subject while working in the tear-sheet department at Time-Life, where the ads were what remained after the articles were clipped.
• In 2005 an Untitled (Cowboy) became the first single photograph to sell for more than $1 million at auction.
• Prince cowboys were the three most expensive photographs sold at auction in 2024.
• Norm Clasen, one of the Marlboro photographers, estimates that about 17 of his images were copied.
• Prince's early cowboys were shot on a 35mm camera and printed at commercial labs.
• Prince used the same title, Untitled (Cowboy), for many different images, so the date and edition number are what identify a specific work.