Richard Prince, the living memory of pop culture | Art and design | Guardian Weekly

The American artist Richard Prince leads a quiet life. Fifteen years ago he went into hiding at Rensselaerville, a small town in Albany County, New York. Prince married a local woman and his daughter grew up here. He plays poker, watches basketball, likes cowboy movies and cars.

To play golf he goes further afield. His friend and golf partner, Bob Rubin, owns a course near New York City, where each member has to make a $650,000 deposit and pay a $30,000 annual membership. Prince, 61, has plenty of money though, having made a fortune in contemporary art. Alongside Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami, he is one of the most highly prized artists.

Prince's 10 most expensive works sell for between $3.4m and $8m. They are large paintings, each representing an alluring nurse. In 2005 Prince's Untitled (Cowboy) was the first rephotograph to fetch more than $1m at an auction.

Such success comes at a price and he has frequently been sued. He is the leading proponent of Appropriation art, a 1970s movement that involves recycling then signing photographs or paintings by other artists. He has, for instance, cut out magazine photos, re-photographing, reframing, enlarging or shrinking them, painting on top and adding text. Famous Prince appropriations include a snap of Brooke Shields naked, aged 10, and Marlboro adverts.

Prices rocketed after his 2007 retrospective at the New York Guggenheim, outraging the authors of the original photographs. "The subtext is clear," Rubin explains. "It's unfair these photographers should only be paid $500, whereas Prince gets $1m." Prince has won all but one of his court cases. Last month a Manhattan federal court judge ruled against Prince in a copyright lawsuit for using 40 photographs by the French photographer Patrick Cariou to produce his Canal Zone series, which was exhibited at New York's Gagosian Gallery in 2008. Prince plans to appeal.

Prince has devoted much of his time to collecting the objects that shaped US culture from the 1950s to the 1980s. The exhibition that opened last month at the National Library (BNF) in Paris sets out to show how his artistic side feeds on his work as a collector. Rubin is behind this project. He emptied the studio and library at Prince's home and put it all together again in Paris.

The result gives us a picture of an artist influenced by two generations, by beatniks and hippies. He is not looking for perfect timing, but rather an accumulation of cultural signs that belong to everyone. It can be elitist or popular culture, chic or vulgar. Despite being one of the most erudite artists around, a fan of Joyce and Apollinaire, Norman Mailer and Bob Dylan, the Paris show combines texts by these writers with the most crude pornographic books.

Prince probably owns the world's finest collection of modern American literature: the copy of On The Road that Jack Kerouac dedicated to Neal Cassady; a copy of Naked Lunch with notes by William Burroughs; the letters Truman Capote sent to Perry Smith before his execution; the manuscript of the Godfather by Mario Puzo; the screenplay of Paths of Glory co-authored by Jim Thompson and Stanley Kubrick; a letter from Thomas Pynchon to a friend; early drafts of songs by Jimi Hendrix. But Prince also has a collection of pulp fiction, erotic cartoons, invoices submitted by writers, cheques including one for $40 that Kerouac sent to Allen Ginsberg.

The Paris exhibition hopes to show how it all connects. It certainly makes sense at the artist's Rensselaerville home, but it's on a massive scale too. Prince has bought or built about a dozen buildings to house thousands of objects – books, photos, albums, magazines, cartoons, posters, cars, videos – but it is hard to say whether they were just picked up or purchased, and whether they ever featured in a work of art. It turns out that the Nurse series started on the covers of pulp fiction; the caption from a cartoon in The New Yorker was borrowed and spread all over a canvas; a pin-up on a motorbike became Untitled (Girlfriend).

At Rensselaerville there is a real sense of harmony between the artist and the man. "He really loves his American culture," Rubin confirms. "He loves the cowboys, beatniks, bikers, nurses and sex. He loves the lost purity of the US too." But Prince himself is absent on my visit to his home.

Richard Prince: American Prayer is at the Bibliothèque National de France, Paris, until 26 June

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk