LakeResortNurse

Richard Prince's Lake Resort Nurse to Highlight Christie's Sale

One of Richard Prince's highly coveted Nurse paintings is up for auction at Christie's on November 12. Lake Resort Nurse (2003) is estimated to fetch up to $7 million at the Post-war and Contemporary Art sale.

Christie's calls Prince's Nurse paintings a "modern embodiment of the Madonna/whore dichotomy," as he manipulates viewers to recall influences as wide-ranging as pulp romance novels, slasher films, masked heroines and Post-WWII iconography.

And Prince did use romance novels as the basis of his work -- scanning in the actual covers and printing them with an ink-jet printer, then layering on suggestive strokes of acrylic paint. (Not surprisingly, the Center for Nursing Advocacy wasn't thrilled with the arguably misogynistic and regressive message of the series.)

See the gallery for more Nurse paintings, which when first -- and last -- exhibited at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in 2004 sold for a reported $45,000-85,000 apiece. The last Nurse painting to be auctioned, Dude Ranch Nurse #2, went for $5.5 million just a week and a half ago.

Gallery: Richard Prince's Nurse Paintings