Prince / Picasso

Over the past two years, Richard Prince (born 1949) has been working on an intensive assimilation of Picasso, producing a succession of collages and canvases that directly dialogue with the modernist master’s oeuvre. For Picasso, as for Prince, the theme of the female nude is an abiding motif--“he never lets go of the body,” as Prince observes--and Prince’s latest nudes are a typically energetic mixture of appropriation and wonderfully crude, irreverent interjection in the fashion of Duchamp, deploying such materials as ink jet printing, oil crayon, pastel, acrylic, graphite and charcoal. The black-and-white photographs of female nudes are derived from recently published anatomy how-to books, and endow Prince’s homages with a graceful, rhythmic plasticity. This elegantly produced, linen-bound volume (with a bellyband that doubles as a folded poster), published for a 2012 exhibition at the Museo Picasso in Málaga, presents these works for the first time. It includes a brief interview with Prince and critical commentary by José Lebrero Stals.