Richard Prince is a central figure in the Pictures Generation, the artists who in the late 1970s turned appropriation into a rigorous critical method. By rephotographing advertisements, most famously the Marlboro cowboy, he exposed how desire and American myth are manufactured through images. His Nurse paintings, Joke works, and Cowboys are held in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, and his practice has shaped decades of debate about authorship, originality, and the status of the copy. Night Club Nurse, shown here, belongs to the series in which a pulp paperback cover is enlarged and veiled in dripping paint, fusing pictorial seduction with the unease that runs throughout his work.