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Artist or Maker: Richard Prince (b. 1949)
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Provenance: Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
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Exhibited: New York, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Richard Prince: Nurse Paintings, September-October 2003, p. 59 (illustrated in color).
West Hartford, University of Hartford Art School, Joseloff Gallery, The Charged Image, September-October 2004, pp. 76-77 and 99 (illustrated in color; detail illustrated in color on the cover).
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Literature: Richard Prince, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, p. 227 (detail illustrated in color).
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Notes: Property from the Collection of Douglas S. Cramer
Man-Crazy Nurse #2 plays the role of the ultimate femme fatale in Richard Prince's celebrated series of nurse paintings. Her full-blooded lust barely concealed by her primly buttoned and starched white uniform, she clutches a standard-issue hospital clipboard as if checking off the names of the men she has devoured. Casting a side-long glance, this libidinous nurse seems to have her next patient/victim in sight. Prince's lushly expressive brushwork, which floods the canvas in shades of fleshy pink and blood red, serves as both a come-on and a warning.
Prince painted Man-Crazy Nurse #2 in 2002, the year he started working on his nurse series, and it was included in his first exhibition of these works at Barbara Gladstone Gallery the following year. In this body of work, Prince appropriated the covers of pulp romance novels from his collection of vintage books and transferred them onto canvas using an ink-jet printer, which he then layered with vigorous skeins of color. He veils his nurses with surgical masks that both add an element of mysterious allure, and turn them into potentially menacing masked bandits. In some cases he retains the original title, while in others he substitutes another novel's title, and heightens ambiguity by blocking out the elements that provide any narrative mooring for his protagonists. The original covers often included handsome doctors or patients, or scenes of lovers caught in rapt embraces, which Prince subsums into a hazy fog of luridly colored paint.
A voracious bibliophile -- an obsession which he has documented in various artist's books such as American English (2003) -- Prince has for years amassed an extensive collection of secondhand books and memorabilia, ranging from titles on film noir and trash literature to letters, manuscripts, publicity pictures, and first editions of favorites such as Lolita. In his library in Rennselaerville, New York, Prince keeps his selection of nurse books in a private room that one enters by passing through a suitably kitsch curtain of beer cans. He also collects illustrator's boards for the cover art for nurse novels, a genre of painting that had often been dismissed as simply trash. His nurse paintings pay homage on an epic scale to the original illustrators of these nurse books, who worked on the fringe of the art world. As Prince described his idiosyncratic oeuvre "The subject matter that I chose wasn't exactly popular, but it wasn't obscure. It just wasn't fashionable. It was more like mainstream cults" (R. Prince in interview with S. Lafreniere, Artforum, March 2003).
Although now more familiar as a standard trope of pornography, as in Prince's own book Naked Nurses (2006), the nurse was the star of a pulp fiction subgenre aimed at a female audience, written by female authors (or men using pseudonyms), thereby forming a virtual pop encyclopedia of feminine desire. Nurses served as popular heroines for pulp fiction fetishization, both because they were relatable working-class figures, and because they were always embroiled in dramatic life-and-death situations. The nurse, a surrogate for the reader, finds herself in an endless range of romantic scenarios, in suggestively titled books such as Aloha Nurse, Nurse in Hollywood, Intimate Nurse, and Danger - Nurse at Work. Popular since the 1940s, these medical romances reached a peak in the 1960s and 1970s, with their lure of sexual adventure. Their covers were calculated to titillate, enticing the reader through image and text with the lure with prurient escapism. The cover of a 1963 novel by Peggy Gaddis promised to reveal "The twisted passions and subtle revenge of a girl they called Man-Crazy Nurse." As in his appropriated photographs of Marlboro men, or his painted renditions of off-color jokes, Prince simultaneously deconstructs and celebrates his lowbrow subjects.
Prince's fixation on the figure of the nurse is not only a result of his fondness for the pulpy underbelly of mainstream literature, but is also revealingly tied to his family background. As Prince explained in an interview six years ago, "I'm painting nurses. I like their hats. Their aprons. Their shoes. My mother was a nurse. My sister was a nurse. My grandmother and two cousins were nurses. I collect 'nurse' books. Paperbacks. You can't miss them. They're all over the airport. I like the words 'nurse,' 'nurses,' 'nursing.' I'm recovering" (Interview with R. Prince, "Like a Beautiful Scar on Your Head," Modern Painters 15, no. 3, Autumn 2002). Such commentary suggests Freudian clichés in overdrive, as fetishism and oedipal instincts collide in the image of the nurse.
In the painterly surface of Man-Crazy Nurse #2, Prince has attacked the canvas with vigorously applied paint that suggests both desire and violence. In this way, his nurse seems to relate to Willem de Kooning's seminal depictions of women from the 1950s, which Prince has indeed used as inspiration for a recent series of paintings after the Abstract Expressionist master. Both artists wrestle with the image of an alluring vamp, creating visions of the eternal feminine that convey both sexual desire and dread. While de Kooning added lips cut from a magazine pin-up to his painted figure of Woman, I (1950-2), Prince likewise highlights the red-stained lips of his man-crazy nurse that seem to glow through her surgical mask.
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