Untitled (cowboy)

"Untitled (cowboy)" is a 1987 chromogenic print by Richard Prince that belongs to the series of rephotographed Marlboro Man images that made the American appropriation artist both famous and infamous, the work representing one of the most iconic and controversial examples of postmodern art's engagement with advertising and American mythology. The composition is a chromogenic print—42.5 × 58.4 centimeters—showing a cowboy in a landscape setting that Prince has rephotographed from a cigarette advertisement, the rephotography creating an image that is simultaneously the ultimate American icon and a hollow commercial simulation, the cowboy reduced from mythic hero to marketing tool. The 1987 date places this work in the period of Prince's most intensive production of the cowboy images, the series that established his reputation as the leading critic of American popular culture and the most provocative practitioner of photographic appropriation. Art historians have connected this work to the broader tradition of the cowboy image in American art, from the paintings of Frederic Remington to the films of John Ford, noting that Prince's treatment is more focused on the mediation and the commodification of the myth, the way that the cowboy has been packaged and sold to the American public, than the celebration or the critique of these other traditions.

This 1987 chromogenic print made Marlboro Man myth commercially hollow through 42cm rephotographed cowboy landscape detachment, using cigarette-ad appropriation to expose American-icon commodification simulation beyond Remington mythic celebration.

It matters because Prince photographed a cowboy and made the print feel like it was selling something it no longer believed in—proving that even a hero could be an empty sign if the rephotography was detached enough.