RICHARD PRINCE — Untitled (cowboy), 2003 / Spiritual America, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007

Museum postcard, Richard Prince, Untitled (cowboy), 2003. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007. Offset-printed on stiff card, 15.2 × 10.8 cm. Full-colour reproduction to recto; printed museum details, barcode, Guggenheim Museum logo, and image caption to verso. Reproduces Untitled (cowboy), 2003, Ektacolor photograph, edition of 2, 40 × 30 inches; courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York.

Issued around Prince’s 2007 Guggenheim retrospective Spiritual America. Prince’s Cowboy works came from rephotographed Marlboro advertisements, stripped of text and returned as art images. The Guggenheim’s teaching material describes how Prince began rephotographing magazine images in the late 1970s and how the Cowboy series isolated an American symbol of adventure, masculinity, and advertising desire.

Within The New Rare register, the postcard is not important because it is large or editioned, but because it is a surviving museum object from the exhibition’s public circulation. Image, caption, barcode, institution, shop and display system. The work moves from advertisement to artwork to museum postcard: a reduced support for a much larger history of appropriation.

Condition: Very good. Unposted, light handling only. Ships flat in protective card-backed packaging; UK and international shipping available.