LOS ANGELES, CA.- There may still be a drought in California, however, major works of art continue to flood the market. Specialty auction house Los Angeles Modern Auctions has been consistently representing top tier icons in the past year from blue-chip modern artists such as Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso, to contemporary stars like Mike Kelley and Vija Celmins. Record setting prices have convinced some important collectors to act locally instead of sending works to New York, which used to be the norm.

LAMA just recently announced a major work by Richard Prince, Bedtime Story (1988) from the series of Monochromatic Joke Paintings, which will be the star lot in their next auction of Important Modern Art & Design in February 2016. With a $1,000,000-2,000,000 pre-sale estimate, it is the highest value work ever offered by the boutique auction house. Asked about his response to some reporters and art insiders expecting the market to drop, Peter Loughrey, director and founder of LAMA says, "Things may be cooling off back East, but the weather out here is just fine."

Richard Prince Bedtime Story (1988)
Bedtime Story will be offered at auction for the first time since its owner purchased it from Regen Projects in 2004, and will be sold with a copy of the original receipt. This painting is from one of Prince’s most pivotal series, the Monochromatic Joke Paintings, an early and immediately critically acclaimed body of work that the artist produced from 1987 to 1989. This impressive work is representative of the apex of the appropriation movement of the 1980s that other artists such as Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, and Mike Bidlo were part of. Even more than that, it connects the new generation of younger artists working in New York to the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, championed by artists like Andy Warhol, famous for his nearly mechanical reproductions of Campbell’s Soup Cans on canvas. Like the Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, Bedtime Story is rendered in a way that shows no indication of a single brushstroke or the touch of an artist’s hand.

“Bedtime Story is not just a painting,” states Zoe Weinberg, LAMA’s Fine Art specialist, “It is an object that represents a paramount moment in recent art history and a turning point in Prince’s career.”

Paintings from the Monochromatic Joke Paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.