Executed in 1993, Untitled (Cheated) belongs to an important sub-series of Richard Prince’s iconic Joke paintings known as the White Paintings. The Joke Paintings, which began in the 1980s as handwritten notes, not only marked a seismic departure from the appropriation of advertising images and photographs that had previously dominated the artist’s practice, but they also flew in the face of the expressive, gestural application of paint that characterised the work of Prince’s contemporaries. The White Paintings offer a crucial stepping stone in the artist’s practice, as he radically re-envisioned the relationship of text and image and delves into a celebration of monochromatic painting.

From his earliest works, Prince’s manipulation of the visual has been nothing short of masterful. In these early years, Prince worked in t.mes magazine’s tear sheet department, developing an intimate understanding of the associative power of images and symbols in contemporary visual culture. Following his iconic series of cowboy photographs in the early 1980s, in which Prince explored his signature conceptual strategy of appropriating imagery from advertising whilst referring to archetypes of the American dream, the artist turned to hand drawn illustrations lifting images from magazine pages to probe the American psyche through his White Paintings. In the present work, ghostly images of bookshelves, banisters and lamps flicker in and out of focus, evoking snapshots of the trappings of a conventional domestic life. The White Paintings delve into the world of image and association, teasing apart the universals of American private life for great comedic effect. The jokes, which were largely appropriated from mass media publications feel deeply rooted both in style and subject matter in white, middle class America. With Prince’s masterful handling of America’s visual vernacular, the White Paintings sit perfectly at the crossroads where American consumer culture meets American psychological culture.

Prince’s heralding of the illustrative and humorous marks a profound shift in the trajectory of contemporary American painting. His jokes offered a radical counter narrative to the explosive, highly expressionistic painting that had dominated the New York art scene. Instead of the gestural application of paint that was fashionable, Prince silkscreened his jokes onto a stark, flat monochrome canvas. The White Paintings speak to the rich tradition of the monochrome in the history of painting in the twentieth century; evoking Robert Ryman’s ethereal, formalist works and Jasper Johns’ evocative White Flag of 1955. With the unique amalgamation of text, image and monochrome, the White Paintings masterfully renegotiate the seemingly antithetical realms of the pictorial and the abstract. As Prince jokingly explained, “the ‘Joke’ paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can’t speak English.” (Richard Prince cited in: Exh. Cat., Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Richard Prince: Canaries in the Coal Mine, 2006, p. 124).

In Untitled (Cheating) Prince’s illustrations appear as ethereal, dreamlike visions, simultaneously complimenting and complicating the joke silkscreened along the lower edge of the painting. Neatly positioned along the lower edge of the canvas, the composition invites the viewer to read the joke as a caption. There is certainly a Duchampian tone to the Joke Paintings, not only in the comedic effect, but in the manipulation of the relationship between text and image. Though what distinguishes Prince from the existing precedent of pairing image and text and from other appropriation artists is the distinctive coolness of his work. There is a distinct fluency in the particularly vernacular sense of humour that Prince employs in this series. As Glenn O’Brien notes, “[His] art is really, really funny. It slays me. That’s what I like about it. It’s funnier than almost anything because it is so serious. When it comes to funniness, the more serious the setup the bigger the payoff and nothing is more deadpan than art” (Glenn O’Brien cited in: Exh. Cat., Paris, Galerie Patrick Seguin, Richard Prince, 2008, p. 109).

The paintings offer a slick disruption to existing artistic tropes, in a way that is at once uniquely American, uniquely prince and uniquely anti-establishment. Though the Joke Paintings initially sought to disrupt prevailing practices in painting, they have by now become firmly established in the very canon they sought to disrupt.