In the late 1980s, American artist Richard Prince asked himself how he could create a painting when commercial images already permeated every aspect of the postmodern world. His solution was to "paint something that got painted in real life." The resulting series of works, though resembling sleek, non-objective, modernist paintings, was actually created from "muscle-car" hoods--specialty hoods available through mail-order. This customized car hood, like others in the series, was stripped of its defining features at an auto body shop, reshaped to a square format (like a traditional painting) in the artist's studio, and repainted with a pristine matte finish. By appropriating this object, celebrated by a particular group of fast-car aficionados as high art, Prince questions the promises of a high modernist utopia.

Richard Prince began his career in the early 1970s as a figurative painter, but soon abandoned this practice for photography. Along with a generation of artists that included Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman, Prince took conceptual photography to another level in the 1980s, directly appropriating materials from mass culture for use in his work. His best-known photographs were deadpan images he rephotographed from such sources as watch advertisements, New Yorker cartoons, and hot-rod and surfer publications. This redefinition of art and photography raised important questions about the ownership of public images, the location of the author, and the nature of invention itself. In Cowboys and Girlfriends, Prince explores pervasive images from American culture. The works on view here relate to two larger series of photographs he made in the 1980s. The archetypal cowboy images, though cropped, are reproduced facsimiles of originals from Marlboro advertisements. The artist began rephotographing them after the company became the target of an antismoking campaign and was forced to stop using its famous model, the Marlboro Man. In Prince's rendition, this "true American" is ironically turned from a hero into a survivor. The Girlfriends pictures in this series are appropriated from ads placed by women in biker magazines. Rephotographed by the artist and enlarged, the womens' self-portraits reveal a fascinating commentary on gender, self-promotion, and the culture of desire. These works join four others by Prince in the Walker's collection, reflecting the museum's commitment to in-depth acquisition of work by influential American artists.

"The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel."--Andy Warhol, 1975 For Warhol and fellow Pop artists, reproducing images from popular culture was the visual means for expressing detachment from emotions, an attitude they regarded as characteristic of the 1960s. Like droning newscasts, repetition dissipates meaning and with it the capacity of images to move or disturb. Warhol created 16 Jackies in response to the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an event whose mass-media coverage reached an unparalleled number of people. The four images of Jacqueline Kennedy, each repeated four times, were enlargements of news photographs that appeared widely and continually in the media after the assassination. Taken from issues of Life magazine, the images depict, from top to bottom: Jackie stepping off the plane upon arrival at Love Field in Dallas; stunned at the swearing-in ceremony for Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One after the president's death; grieving at the Capitol; and smiling in the limousine before the assassination. 16 Jackies combines a number of themes important in Warhol's work, such as his fascination with American icons and celebrities, his interest in the mass media and the dissemination of imagery, and his preoccupation with death.

I try to make art which celebrates doubt and uncertainty. Which provokes answers but doesn't give them. Which withholds absolute meaning by incorporating parasite meanings. Which suspends meaning while perpetually dispatching you toward interpretation, urging you beyond dogmatism, beyond doctrine, beyond ideology, beyond authority.--Sherrie Levine Since the early 1980s, Sherrie Levine has made a career out of re-using--or appropriating--famous works of art, often by making new versions of them and placing them in different contexts. Throughout her career, Levine has created art based on works by prominent male artists from the early 20th century in order to underscore the relative absence of women in the art world at that time. Her sources have included Walker Evans' photographs and Constantin Brancusi's sculptures. Levine's piece, entitled Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp: A. P.), is inspired by Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917). When Levine's Fountain is compared with Duchamp's sculpture, it is apparent that it is not an exact copy. Most notably, Duchamp's piece was an actual urinal, turned upside-down and unaltered except for his signature. He believed he could transform such mass-produced, everyday objects into artworks merely by proclaiming them so, and called them "readymades." In contrast, Levine's sculpture is a contemporary urinal cast in the sculptor's traditional precious metal, bronze. Polished to a brilliant shine, this piece is no longer a common, store-bought item; it has been transformed by the artist into a unique object.

Although Warhol was already impressed with the glamour of Jackie Kennedy by 1962,1 he was unmoved by the news of John Kennedy's assassination the following year. He later recalled: I heard the news over the radio when I was alone painting in my studio. I don't think I missed a stroke. I wanted to know what was going on out there, but that was the extent of my reaction.... Henry Geldzahler wanted to know why I wasn't more upset, so I told him about the time I was walking in India and saw a bunch of people in a clearing having a ball because somebody they really liked had just died and how I realized then that everything was just how you decided to think about it. I'd been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart--but it didn't bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad. It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't get away from the thing.... John Quinn, the playwright ... was moaning over and over, "But Jackie was the most glamorous First Lady we'll every get."2 For Warhol, the visual means for expressing detachment from emotions, an attitude he regarded as characteristic of the 1960s in general,3 was through the replication of images. Like the droning repetition of newscasts, the device dissipates meaning, and with it the capacity of images to move or disturb: "The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel."4 The sixteen faces of Jackie Kennedy in Warhol's painting were blown up from four news photos that appeared ubiquitously in the media after the assassination. From top to bottom, the images are of Jackie smiling at Love Field on arrival in Dallas; stunned at the swearing-in ceremony for L.B.J. on Air Force One after the president's death; grieving at the Capitol; and in the limousine before the shooting. The top three appeared in the 24 November and 6 December 1963 issues of Life magazine: the first by an unidentified photographer; the second and third by Cecil Stoughton and Fred Ward, respectively; the source for the bottom one has not been identified, although a U.P.I. photograph similar to it was reproduced in Newsweek. Eventually, in Warhol's view, these images became so familiar that neutral identification is all that the viewer experiences. Warhol make this point by repeating each of the four image of Jackie four times, in a simple well-designed non-sequential alternation of strips of "before and after" pictures. The high-contrast, low-information pictures, each as different from the others as one reproduction from another, are cropped to focus on Jackie's face, rhythmically directed one way along one row and then the other along the next. A deliberately careless look gives the painting a sense of chance and hurry, suggesting the quick duplication and dissemination of images.5 Additionally, expressivity is, in a sense, absent from the images themselves. Public expectation forces the face of the politician's wife into a perpetual, meaningless smile, while shock renders the widow as inexpressive and numb as one of Warhol's somnambulant superstars. The two faces, perceived by Warhol as equally unreal, have been further sapped of meaning by the mythologizing American culture and the techniques of reproduction, and are finally emptied of meaning by the artist's stylization. 1 See Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, PoPism: The Warhol '60s (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 36. 2 Ibid., p. 60. 3 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 27. 4 Warhol, PoPism, p. 50. It is interesting to note that 16 Jackies ignited the passion of a vandal who inscribed the words "HOGWASH/USA" on the panel third from the top on the leftmost column and "BLACK" on the panel second from the top on the rightmost column in ballpoint pen in November 1967; the inscriptions were successfully removed by Daniel Goldreyer in New York by late January 1968. 5 Warhol describes the silkscreening process he used, which allowed him to turn the work of reproducing the design over to Gerard Malanga and other assistants: "You pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple-quick and chancy;" Warhol, PoPism, p. 22.

"I'd been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart--but it didn't bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad."--Andy Warhol After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Andy Warhol began his series of "Jackie paintings" in response to the media blitz that followed the incident. 16 Jackies is a grid of four different images based on news photos of Jacqueline Kennedy from international press coverage of JFK's death. As in Brillo Boxes (1964/1969, also on view here), the artist elevates commercial iconography to the status of fine art. In so doing, Warhol allows his viewer to consider the overlap of things that American culture values: wealth and success, human emotion, and artistic expression.

This sculpture by Sherrie Levine, entitled Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp: A.P.) is inspired by Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917). Since the early 1980s, Levine has made a career out of re-using--or appropriating--famous works of art, often by making new versions of them and placing them in different contexts. Throughout her career, Levine has created art based on works by prominent male artists from the early 20th century in order to underscore the relative absence of women in the art world at that time. In addition to Duchamp, her sources include Walker Evans' photographs and Constantin Brancusi's sculptures. What's so special about a copy of a famous work of art? If you compare Levine's Fountain with Duchamp's sculpture, you'll notice that it's not an exact copy. Most notably, Duchamp's piece was an actual urinal, turned upside down and unaltered except for his signature. He believed he could transform such mass-produced, everyday objects into artworks merely by proclaiming them so. He called these works "readymades." In contrast, Levine's Fountain is a contemporary urinal cast in a precious metal--bronze, the traditional material for casting sculpture. Polished to a brilliant shine, this work is no longer a common, store-bought object but something quite unique. Levine's Fountain is placed at the entrance to the permanent collection exhibition galleries as a hint at the changes that have taken place in art over our century. Moreover, this sculpture shows that today's artistic innovations continue to be built on the achievements of the past. Sherrie Levine talks about her work "I try to make art which celebrates doubt and uncertainty. Which provokes answers but doesn't give them. Which withholds absolute meaning by incorporating parasite meanings. Which suspends meaning while perpetually dispatching you toward interpretation, urging you beyond dogmatism, beyond doctrine, beyond ideology, beyond authority."

"When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums."--Andy Warhol Andy Warhol is arguably the most important figure of American Pop Art, a 1960s movement characterized by its critique of postwar consumerism and popular culture. Warhol is widely known for cool, detached works that borrow images from television, advertising, and other mass media. His subject matter included ubiquitous consumer items such as Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell's soup cans and celebrity figures ranging from Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley to Jacqueline Kennedy. In Brillo Boxes Warhol took a popular consumer item and elevated it to the level of high art by producing large-scale trompel'oeil (trick of the eye) versions of the original. Warhol silkscreened the "Brillo Pad" logo onto previously manufactured, painted wooden boxes, and stacked the objects to mimic a supermarket product display.