Jean-Michel Basquiat

Annina Nosei Gallery, New York
Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
Sale: Christie’s, New York, Contemporary Art, Part I, 18 November 1997, Lot 142
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Los Angeles, Gagosian Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings, 1982
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1992-93, p. 98, illustrated

Executed in 1982, Untitled (Black Skull) is one of the artist’s most ambitious explorations to date of the leitmotif that would become central to his expressionist iconography: the skull. It was in 1980 that Jean-Michel Basquiat graduated from spraying gloomy slogans on the walls of Lower Manhatten to making pictures for the SoHo market, debuting at Annina Nosei Gallery in 1981. It was not until the following year, however, at the precociously young age of 22, that Basquiat’s personal style reached its full maturity, his powerfully explosive work breathing new life into a dour modernist logic that many held as defunct.

Executed at Basquiat’s creative zenith, Untitled (Black Skull) presents a complex yet candid evocation of a skull, the hollow eye sockets and bared teeth of this rough hewn head emerging against a densely textured jet black background which reveals evidence of layered histories of different colours and media. In the present work, the three-quarter view of the skull is reminiscent of Andy Warhol – a great influence and later collaborator – and his 1976 series. The skull as a motif in art history is steeped in rich connotations, most notably as a momento mori, a haunting reminder of death, in the vanitas still life tradition from the Seventeenth through to the Nineteenth centuries. Death was never far from Warhol’s work and the meaning would not have been lost on Basquiat, whose own tragically short life (he died six years later) is chillingly foretold in his choice of motif. Skeletal in appearance, the motif also evinces Basquiat’s fascination with the anatomical drawings of Leonardo (fig. 1), who Basquiat, a self-taught draftsman, admired immensely. In the diagrammatic simplicity of the skull and the femur bone to the right of the composition, we also see echoes of the schematised drawings found in Gray’s Anatomy, a book which Basquiat read as a child in hospital after a serious car accident, awakening a scientific and morbid fascination with the human body, its muscles, bones and sinews.

Crucially, however, this cannot be interpreted simply as an inanimate skull; this is a vitally interactive being, responsive to external stimuli. Although the eye sockets are hollow, the vibrant orange Dubuffet-like contours which delineate them infer sensory and cognitive activity. Mask-like in its construction, the overlaying of separate, interspersed lines around the emaciated, scarified eyes and jaw hints at his Haitian heritage and a spiritual, Shaman-like figure. Undeniably inspired by the Cubism of his great hero Picasso, the skull also looks back to Picasso’s own sources in primitive African art, in itself a validation of Basquiat’s own cultural heritage. In particular, Basquiat’s motif bears striking similarities to a series of primitive Death Heads that Picasso made in the mid 1940s. For Picasso, primitivism was an antidote to the conservatism of the academies; similarly Basquiat finds in his own recourse to primitivism a corrective to the chaste intellectual coolness of late modernism.

The paradigmatic artist of a generation that sought to revitalise painting, the background to Untitled (Black Skull) reveal both Basquiat’s familiarity and facility with the lessons of the great abstract painters of the past. Created with the expressive flair of Willem de Kooning and the painterly spontaneity of Jackson Pollock, Basquiat bends what they taught about abstraction to his own figuration. From behind the black overpainting, the shrill tones of red orange and yellow have both expressive power and symbolic associations, their chromatic intensity connoting an apocalyptic world of fire and upheaval. His masterful understanding of the language of modern painting articulates a gloriously freestyle cacophony of inspirations, each vying against one another like successive layers of graffiti on a wall.

Surrounding the skull and limb, the cryptic iconography of the balancing scales, the laurel crown and primitive arrow are given bold relief against the raven background. Like hieroglyphics, they are incised in pristine white oil stick with the assured confidence and spontaneity of an artist in firm command of his materials. However, this cipher of symbols, democratically gleaned from sources as various as urban graffiti, African cult and Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook, while always inferring meaning remains ultimately inscrutable. The arrow – or spear – hints at primitive civilisation and savagery, alluding to the troubled colonial history of the African continent and the epic historical struggle of African Americans. The balancing scales, the quintessential symbol of justice and equality, the cornerstone of Western civilisation, stand in ironic juxtaposition. For someone of Basquiat’s background, the principal issue was the direct representation of an African cultural heritage in the artistic tradition of the West; unlike in literature and in music, in the visual arts black culture was significantly underrepresented. In the present work, the leaves that adorn the skull symbolise a laurel crown, traditionally a symbol that an artist’s renown will outlive him, here indicative of Basquiat’s assault on the predominantly white New York art world. In Untitled (Black Skull), the grand themes of race, life, death and equality are intertwined in an image that embodies the anxiety of the modern consciousness.