Jean-Michel Basquiat

Mary Boone Gallery, New York
Galerie Bruno Bischofsberger, Zurich
Akira Ikeda Gallery, Tokyo
Private Collection, Japan
Van de Weghe Fine Art, New York
Private Collection, New York

Tokyo, PS Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1987, no. 3

Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 1996, p. 172-3, illustrated in colour
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 2000, 3rd Ed., Vol. II, p. 172-3, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonalities are brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Executed in 1983, the year Basquiat truly cemented his international reputation, Hoax is testament to the accomplished and ambitious pictorial intelligence of an artist at the meteoric apex of his career. The works produced in late 1982 and throughout the following year demonstrate an increasingly sophisticated project heralded by the significant corpus of highly ambitious paintings stretched over jutting corner supports and exposed stretcher bars to which the present work belongs. As though physically dismantling and reconstituting the canon of painting from the inside out, these works communicate the deliberately raw aesthetic that provided an alternative to the alienating condescension of a contemporary milieu of intellectualised minimalism. Possessing a palette of strident primaries, Basquiat at once combines abstract painterly gestures with the chromatic coda of Modernism, whilst wielding an ephemeral command of line evocative of Cy Twombly. Mediated by multifaceted allusion, the present work is archetypal of Basquiat’s utterly inimitable painterly synthesis. Grounded in an allusion to copyright and deception as thematized by a reference to one of the most famous hoaxes in American history, The Cardiff Giant Hoax, the present work delivers a fascinating palimpsest in which Basquiat typically deconstructs and weaves encyclopaedic knowledge into the fabric of his own biography and assiduous deployment of art history.

The works created during these early years of intense creativity are characterized by a keen sense of cultural and historic allusion. Possessing a prodigious intelligence, Basquiat infused his art with a rebellious and nomadic freedom. The present work is such an example of the artist’s taxonomic wealth of knowledge and powers of evocation. Via the prominence of various heads in profile and a large foot hovering above an explicit inscription, The Cardiff Giant Hoax, Basquiat directly invokes one of the most elaborate and famous hoaxes in American history. Unearthed in Cardiff, New York on 16 October 1868, the ‘petrified’ body of a ten-foot man was heralded as proof that giants had once graced the earth. Orchestrating the whole event however, a local tobacconist named George Hull paid a significant sum to have the large human form carved from gypsum. Having set up a tent over the burial site, Hull charged people to view the Giant in situ as theological proof of the biblical passage in Genesis: ‘There were Giants on the earth in those days’ - a detail sardonically underlined Basquiat’s repetition of the motto ‘In God We Trust’ present on the profusion of U.S coins scattered throughout the composition. Though unveiled as a hoax by Yale archeaologists, religious fanatics continued to support the giant’s authenticity. Hull later sold the giant to a syndicate of men who took it to Syracruse for exhibition where its popularity proved unrelenting. Indeed the giant even piqued the interest of legendary showman P.T. Barnum who offered to buy it for $50,000. When his offer was declined, Barnum commissioned a forgery to be covertly made from original, which was then exhibited in New York as the genuine Cardiff Giant. Barnum boldly substantiated his own authenticity by denouncing in the newspapers the bogus nature of the original. Barnum is today remembered for his notorious hoaxes and elaborate scams - often attributed as the origin for famous dictum, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’. By evoking this particular story of outlandish deception and double-crossing in American history, Basquiat at once reveals a biographical and formal pictorial subtext. Basquiat’s astronomic rise to prominence was exponential and utterly prodigal. Perhaps the notion of the hoax here autobiographically refers to the artist’s own creative insecurities. The trappings of success awarded so swiftly may at times have seemed extreme for an artist with no formal training. Nonetheless, there is no doubting Basquiat’s prodigious artistic ambition and erudite command of an inimitable semiotic code.

Since the artist’s earliest days as a graffiti-poet in downtown New York, the notion of copyright and forgery had always been a loaded semiotic sphere: the copyright logo accompanied his pseudonym tag SAMO as did the perfunctory crown that filtered into his early works on canvas. Basquiat was very much attuned to the commercial world of advertising and pop-culture in which intellectual property and the ownership of brand identity is imperative. What is more, for an artist whose expression is embroiled in a pluralistic visual language akin to a magpie’s nest of art historical allusion, the idea of patenting artistic identity is incredibly relevant. As outlined by Rene Ricard in his crucial early piece on Basquiat written in 1981: “He is also addicted to the copyright sign itself. Double copyright. So invention isn’t important; it’s the patent, the transition from the public sector into the private, the monopolizing personal usurption of a public utility, of prior art; no matter who owned it before, you own it now” (Rene Ricard, ‘Jean Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child’, Artforum, December 1981).  In this particular work, Basquiat literally copies himself. The abundance of colour Xerox copies of drawings, some of which appear repeated across the canvas, witness Basquiat plagiarise and recapitulate his own back-catalogue to say something new.

From late 1982 to the end of 1983, Basquiat created some of the most self-assured works of his entire career. Embodying the critical attitudes and methods of early Hip-Hop, many of the works produced in 1983 are characterised by this use of pasted and layered Xerox copies - a repetitious device of re-using and sampling his own work akin to contemporaneous innovation of the re-mix. Basquiat described the melding of works on canvas and paper in an interview with Henry Geldzahler in 1983: "I'd been sort of living off this pile of drawings from last year, sticking them on paintings" (the artist cited in: Henry Geldzahler, 'Art from Subways to Soho', 1983, in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1999, p. 49). Indeed, 1983 was the very year Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released The Message, the breakthrough song of the vanguard music scene in Brooklyn that in turn laid the very foundations of present day Hip-Hop. Ripped, roughly pasted on canvas, and frantically over-painted like a city wall covered in graffiti, the present work is testament to Basquiat's personification of this cultural movement, encompassing the boundary-crossing appropriative methodology of a turntablist in subtly spinning a wealth of narrative. Indeed, to employ Franklin Sirman's analogy; "like the best Hip-Hop", Hoax "takes apart reassembles the work that came before it... it dismantles its historical precedents by showing mastery over their techniques and styles, and puts them to new uses, in which the new becomes the final product layered over the past" (Franklin Sirmans, 'In the Cipher: Basquiat and Hip-Hop Culture', in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Brooklyn Museum, Basquiat, 2005, p. 92).