Richard Prince’s Ulysses Blue

Richard Prince, Untitled and Untitled (Ulysses), 2011, at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2014, photos: Rudolf Sagmeister and Dietrich Gehring, via Contemporary Art Daily Talking this morning with Matt, our book man in Venice, about the intense passions of collectors of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and he reminded me that Richard Prince’s own bibliophilia covered Ulysses, too. In Prince’s birdtalk texts from 2014, there’s a bit about yearning for the copy Joyce inscribed to Ezra Pound. And another about going to Dijon to see where Ulysses was first printed, and hunting down the Greek flag blue that appeared on the cover of the 1st edition. Which was the same moment Prince opened It’s A Free Concert, a show at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, which included a large, book-shaped monochrome diptych, Untitled (Ulysses), in Joyce’s—and Greece’s—blue. It’s dated 2011, so he’d had it on his mind for a while.